This tutorial covers how to install Docker on an Ubuntu 20.04 machine. Docker is an open-source containerization platform that allows you to quickly build, test, and deploy applications as portable containers that can run virtually anywhere. Due to that, docker-compose matchs the docker package version, but is outdated respect to docker.io. That's why, in Ubuntu 20.04, a docker-compose.yml file with version 3.8 is rejected by the docker-compose Ubuntu package; however, docker-compose file format 3.8 is right one respect to the docker.io version. – Peregring-lk Jun 8 '20 at 0:12.

Docker Compose is a Python program that lets you easily deploy multiple containers on a server.

As you start exploring Docker, you'll learn that often to run a certain web-app, you'll need to run various services (like database, web-server etc) in different containers.

Deploying multiple containers is a lot easier with Docker Compose.

Install Docker Compose Ubuntu 20.04

In this tutorial, you'll learn two ways of installing Docker Compose on Ubuntu:

  • Installing Docker Compose from Ubuntu's repository: Easier method but may not have the latest version of docker compose
  • Installing the latest Docker Compose using PIP: Gets you the newer docker compose version

Keep in mind that to use Docker Compose, you must have Docker installed on Ubuntu.

Install Docker Compose from Ubuntu's repository

This is the easiest and recommend method. Unless you need the latest Docker Compose version for some specific reasons, you can manage very well with the docker compose version provides by Ubuntu.

Docker Compose is available in the universe repository of Ubuntu 20.04 and 18.04 so make sure to enable it first:

You probably won't need it but no harm in updating the local cache:

Now you can install Docker Compose in Ubuntu using this command:

Ubuntu

You can check that Docker Compose is installed successfully by checking its version:

It should show an output like this:

Install the latest Docker Compose on Ubuntu using PIP

PIP stands for 'PIP Installs Package'. It's a command-line based package manager for installing Python applications.

Since Docker Compose is basically a Python program, you can use PIP to install it.

But before you do that, you need to install PIP on Ubuntu first.

Enable the universe repository first.

Install PIP now:

Now that you have PIP installed use it to install Docker Compose for all users on your Linux system:

Install Docker On Ubuntu 20.04 Server

Check the Docker Compose version to ensure that it is installed successfully:

You can see that Docker Compose installed via PIP is more recent version.

I hope you were able to successfully install Docker Compose on Ubuntu with this tutorial. Questions and suggestions are welcome.

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