About

GitHub Action to set up (download and install) Docker CE. Works on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Note

This action is useful if you want to pin against a specific Docker version or set up a custom daemon configuration or if Docker is not available on your runner. If you're using GitHub-hosted runners on Linux or Windows, Docker is already up and running, so it might not be necessary to use this action.

Warning

Does not work on macOS runners with ARM architecture (no nested virtualization):

• #53
• docker/actions-toolkit#317

---

• Usage
  • Quick start
  • Daemon configuration
  • Define custom limactl start arguments (macOS)
• Customizing
  • inputs
  • inputs.version
  • outputs
• Contributing
• License

Usage

Quick start

name: ci

on:
  push:

jobs:
  docker:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      -
        name: Set up Docker
        uses: docker/setup-docker-action@v4

Daemon configuration

You can configure the Docker daemon using the daemon-config input. In the following example, we configure the Docker daemon to enable debug and the containerd image store feature:

name: ci

on:
  push:

jobs:
  docker:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      -
        name: Set up Docker
        uses: docker/setup-docker-action@v4
        with:
          daemon-config: |
            {
              "debug": true,
              "features": {
                "containerd-snapshotter": true
              }
            }

Define custom limactl start arguments (macOS)

You can define custom limactl start arguments using the LIMA_START_ARGS environment variable to customize the VM:

name: ci

on:
  push:

jobs:
  docker:
    runs-on: macos-latest
    steps:
      -
        name: Set up Docker
        uses: docker/setup-docker-action@v4
        env:
          LIMA_START_ARGS: --cpus 4 --memory 8

Customizing

inputs

The following inputs can be used as step.with keys

Name	Type	Default	Description
version	String	latest	Docker version to use. See inputs.version.
channel	String	stable	Docker CE channel (stable or test). Only applicable to type=archive
daemon-config	String		Docker daemon JSON configuration
tcp-port	Number		TCP port to expose the Docker API locally
context	String	setup-docker-action	Docker context name.
set-host	Bool	false	Set DOCKER_HOST environment variable to docker socket path.
rootless	Bool	false	Start daemon in rootless mode

inputs.version

By default, the latest stable version of Docker is fetched from download.docker.com.

You can specify a specific version number (e.g. v27.4.0). Which is a shorthand for the full comma separated value:

type=archive,channel=stable,version=v27.4.0

You can also use this full csv format instead.

Currently supported source types are:

• archive
• image

type=archive

Key	Default	Description
type	archive	The source type of the Docker binaries. Possible values are archive and image.
channel	stable	The download.docker.com channel (stable or test).
version	latest	The Docker version to use.

Examples:

# last stable released version
version: latest
version: type=archive                 # same as above
version: version=latest               # same as above
version: type=archive,version=latest  # same as above

# v27.3.0-rc.1 from test channel
version: type=archive,version=27.3.0-rc.1,channel=test

type=image

Other possible source type is image which will pull the Docker binaries from the moby/moby-bin and dockereng/cli-bin Docker Hub repositories. The advantage of using this source type is that these images are built by the Moby and Docker CI pipelines for each branch and PR, so you can use the tag input to install a specific version or branch (e.g. master).

Key	Default	Description
tag	latest	The image tag to use.

See https://hub.docker.com/r/moby/moby-bin/tags and https://hub.docker.com/r/dockereng/cli-bin/tags for available tags.

Examples:

# install last stable released version from bin images
version: type=image
version: type=image,tag=latest        # same as above

# a cutting-edge version from the `master` branch
version: type=image,tag=master

# install v27.4.0 from bin images
version: type=image,tag=27.4.0

outputs

The following outputs are available

Name	Type	Description
sock	String	Docker socket path
tcp	String	Docker TCP address if tcp-port is set

Contributing

Want to contribute? Awesome! You can find information about contributing to this project in the CONTRIBUTING.md

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE for more details.