Follow the official installation instructions. Docker runs natively on (recent) Linux kernels, and via a VM on Windows and Mac OS X.
Open a terminal and change to the new directory created above. Now execute the following command to build an image called named_data/nfd:
docker build -t named_data/nfd .
This is similar to a compilation step to transform source code (the Dockerfile) into executable code (the Docker image). The first time you run that command, it will pull the Ubuntu base image; this will take some time. Later rebuilds happen fast, thanks to Docker's snapshotting.
To start a process (create a Docker container), you use the docker run command.
docker run named_data/nfd
Docker is a command-line frontend to operating system-level virtualization solutions such as Linux containers (LXC). This allows running application processes in isolation, just like a VM, but without the overhead of a traditional VM – for example, there is no (operating system) boot process involved.
The interactive Docker tutorial is a great way to get started with Docker.
You find the full documentation of the docker run command along with the full command line reference on the Docker documentation site.
Docker works best if a container runs only one process at a time, such as NFD. Bash is usually only used for exploration. To trim down the image, consider using Debian (90 MB) or Busybox (2.5 MB) as a base image instead of Ubuntu (225 MB). (There are currently no instructions for these base images, as these distributions are currently not supported / tested by the Named Data project.)
- Push a trusted build to the Docker registry so others can directly pull the pre-built image.