Today, at Microsoft and Docker, Inc. we are making the Docker command line interface available on Windows starting with the Docker 1.6 release. As a part of our partnership, Microsoft has worked with the Docker community to port the Docker client to Windows, making it easy to manage Docker hosts and containers for those using Windows as their development machines.

Docker Client for Windows can be used to manage Docker hosts running Linux containers today, and managing Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers will be supported in the future to provide the same standard Docker Client and interface on multiple development environments.

Microsoft and Docker have collaborated to port the Docker Client to the Windows environment in Docker’s open source project, which you can see on GitHub. We will continue to improve the overall experience for Azure users by developing Docker Engine for Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers as part of the Docker open source project and participate in the greater Docker community actively. Windows Server Container Images will also be available in the Docker Hub alongside the 45,000 and growing Docker images for Linux already available.

How to Install

You can download official distribution of Docker Client for Windows by either installing it from the Chocolatey package manager or installing Boot2Docker, which provides a Docker-ready development environment inside a local virtual machine.

Please read the Windows Installation instructions in the Docker User Guide to learn more.

Further Reading

Please refer to the following documentation on setting up virtual machines as Docker hosts on Azure:

• Creating Docker hosts on Azure with VM Extension
• Creating Docker hosts from Microsoft Azure Marketplace
• Using Docker Machine to create Docker hosts on Azure

Acknowledgements

Many people from both Docker and the greater community have worked on developing Docker so far. Special thanks to Jessica Frazelle, Arnaud Porterie and Tibor Vass from Docker, Sachin Joshi and Brendan Dixon from Microsoft, Tianon from Docker community and many other Docker contributors who helped bring the Docker Client to Windows.

Ahmet Alp Balkan (@ahmetalpbalkan)
Software Engineer, Azure Compute