Before proceeding please note that Dply services are no longer available 

If you’re an IT professional (or a wanna be IT professional), a technology enthusiast or a tinkerer you must have heard about Docker and how it’s the next big thing in application deployment, you can use docker for application deployment on servers or even on your raspberry pi. If you’ve never heard of it then let me give you the short description, it’s a container that allows you deploy applications inside software containers. Cloud9 IDE that we’ve covered in numerous posts before is a Docker container in of itself.

If you’re like me, you must have been wondering about how you can try deploying Docker and Docker applications on a test server before deploying it on an active server or on your raspberry pi, and this post is just for that.

Dply.co is a new service that gives you a free server for two hours (of course you can extend this time period but you’ll have to pay), we’re going to use this generous offer to try out Docker and Docker applications.

This post will be just the introduction so we’ll learn how to start the server, create the key and log into it and then install Docker and test the installation, later we’re going to build on this post and see how can we use what we’ve learned here to deploy useful Docker applications.

Step One

The first step is to log into Dply.co and sign in using your Github account.

Step Two

You’ll then directed to your dashboard, just click on the “Create One” link.

Step Three

You’ll then be directed to the node creation wizard, for this tutorial we’ll name the node (Docker), select “Ubuntu 16.04” for the OS, select “Singapore” for the location, then you’ll need to create SSH key and there are many ways to do that, the one I’m using is to download PuTTY key generator and after downloading it, click on the generate tab and then move the mouse in the empty field to generate a random key, after the key is generated copy and paste it in the dply field. In the puTTY windows click on the “save private key” tab and save the key to your computer, it’s very important as you’ll use it to log to your node.

Step Four

You’ll then be directed to your dashboard and the instance will be created, just copy your IP address to log into it.

Step Five

Now, to access your instance/node you’ll need PuTTY (if you’re using windows like me), so first download PuTTY, then paste your instance/node IP in the Host Name field in putty.

Step Six

Now in PuTTY go to connections >> SSH >> Auth from the left menu, click on browse and direct it to the location where you’ve downloaded your private key from step 3.

Step Seven

Now, click open and the terminal will pop up.You should log as root (type root in the terminal) and hit enter.

Step Nine

Now, we can start download and installing Docker, the first step is to copy and paste the following command to update the packages on your instance/node:

apt-get update

Step Ten

Now, we need to add the GPG for the official Docker repository, to do that copy and paste the following command;

apt-key adv –keyserver hkp://p80.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 –recv-keys 58118E89F3A912897C070ADBF76221572C52609D

Step Eleven

Now, we need to add the Docker repository to the APT sources;

apt-add-repository ‘deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo ubuntu-xenial main’

After that update the system using the following command;

apt-get update

Step Twelve

Now, you should start the installation process for Docker using the following command;

apt-get install -y docker-engine

Now, check whether the installation was complete correctly or not using the following command;

sudo systemctl status docker

And you should be prompted by a message like the one below.

Congratulations, you’ve successfully initiated an instance on Dply and installed Docker, we’re going to use this knowledge to deploy many useful applications in the coming posts.