Installing Older Docker Client Binaries on Fedora

Sometimes there’s a need to have different versions of the Docker client binary available. On Linux this can be a bit challenging because you don’t want to install a “full” Docker package (which would also include the Docker daemon); you only need the binary. In this article, I’ll outline a process I followed to get multiple (older) versions of the Docker client binary on my Fedora 27 laptop.

The process has two steps:

1. Download the RPMs for the older releases from the Docker Yum repository (for Fedora, that repository is here).
2. Extract the files from the RPM without actually installing the RPM.

For step 1, you can use the curl program to download specific RPMs. For example, to download version 1.12.6 of the Docker client binary, you’d download the appropriate RPM like this:

curl -LO https://yum.dockerproject.org/repo/main/fedora/24/Packages/docker-engine-1.12.6-1.fc24.x86_64.rpm

You’ll note that the URL above appears to be tied to a particular Fedora version (24, in this case). However, that’s only significant/applicable for the entire RPM package; once you extract the specific binaries, you should have no issues running the binaries on a different version (I was able to run older versions of Docker—ranging from 1.9.1 to 1.13.1—on Fedora 27 with no issues).

Once you have the RPM, you can use rpm2cpio and cpio (as outlined in this article) to extract the files inside the RPM. For example, to extract the files from the RPM downloaded above, you’d use a command like this:

rpm2cpio docker-engine-1.12.6-1.fc24.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv

This will extract all the individual files in the RPM package. In this specific example, you’ll see two directories created: a usr directory and an etc directory. Digging into the usr directory, you’ll find the docker client binary in a bin subdirectory. This client binary is really the only thing we need from the package, so we can copy it out:

cp usr/bin/docker ./docker-1.12.6

You’ll note that I “versioned” the file in the name, so as to make it easier for multiple versions of the Docker client binary to co-exist on the same Linux system.

With the Docker client binary extracted, we can remove the extracted files and the downloaded RPM package:

rm -rf etc
rm -rf usr
rm docker-engine-1.12.6-1.fc24.x86_64.rpm

(Important warning: you’ll note that my references to usr and etc lack a preceding forward slash, meaning I’m referencing directories named usr and etc in the current directory. Be sure you do not include the leading slash, or you’ll be in a world of hurt.)

You can place the extracted binary wherever you’d like (I like to use /opt/docker/bin), and repeat the process for a different version. Whenever you need to run a particular version of the Docker client, you have (at least) three options:

1. Somewhere in your PATH, create a symbolic link named docker that points to the version you want to run. Then, just run docker like you normally would.
2. Specify the full path to the client binary you want to run.
3. Temporarily alias docker to the particular binary version you want.

If you plan on having a “full” Docker package installed on your Linux system (quite handy, by the way), then option #1 may be a bit more complicated; you may prefer option #2 or option #3. Option #3 probably provides the best balance between ease-of-use and flexibility. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Here’s hoping others find this information useful as well!

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