How To Build The Native Docker Client On Windows

Requisites

Scoop [OPTIONAL]. Will be used below for installing several tools.

Go Programming Language - scoop install go.

Bash: either using Git Bash or Busybox for Windows - scoop install busybox.

Powershell (It comes with Windows. You can use cmd if you want but you’ll have to adjust the commands yourself).

Install Go

To install go, I used Scoop with scoop install go (yes, it’s that easy! Its like homebrew but for Windows), or you can download their installer if you please.

Once installed, you should be able to run go version from the command line (I’m using Powershell) to see the following:

go version go1.4.1 windows/amd64

Set Go Environment Variable

We need to set the GOPATH environment variable for the go install directory: c:\gopath or $env:homepath\AppData\Local\scoop\apps\go\1.4.1 (the last part will depend on your go version from the command above).

In Powershell set it by running $env:GOPATH="path/to/go" for example in my case it was $env:GOPATH="$env:homepath\AppData\Local\scoop\apps\go\1.4.1"

NB. Using $env in Powershell only lasts for the Powershell session. It would be wise to add GOPATH as a permanent envir

Lets change directories to the GOPATH before we mangle it later.


cd $env:GOPATH

Get The Docker Source

From the command line you need to run go get github.com/docker/docker which will download the docker source into your go code library.

There are also a couple of other environment variables required for compiling docker:


$env:DOCKER_CLIENTONLY=1

# This is the mangling of the GOPATH that I was talking about
$env:GOPATH="$env:GOPATH\src\github.com\docker\docker\vendor;$env:GOPATH"

Notice that we extended GOPATH variable, paying particular attention to the order of the path, which places the vendor directory before the original GOPATH.

Compile go-autogen

For this step you’ll need a copy of Bash. If you use GitHub for Windows, you can use Git Bash, or if you have Scoop, you can run scoop install busybox which comes with Bash.

Then run the following:


# You should be at the GOPATH directory at this point
cd src\github.com\docker\docker
bash .\project\make\.go-autogen

Finally, Compile Docker


# You're already at GOPATH\src\github.com\docker\docker
# But we need to go deeper!
cd docker
go build -v

You should then have a nice new docker.exe file in the current directory. You can add this directory to your PATH or alternatively run shim ./docker.exe if you have shim from scoop installed (scoop install shim).

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You still need a Virtual Machine interface like Boot2Docker or docker-machine. Having the docker client doesn’t mean that the docker daemon runs on Windows yet.

If you configure DOCKER_HOST to point to your docker instance (whether on a server or running in a VM) you can now use the docker client natively on Windows to interface with it.

Have fun!