Use docker on nixos

If you are a developer, you will definitely need to use Docker at one time or another. If you are on nixos, you might have postponed this step for as long as I did, but time will come when you will want to do it in nixos also :) I actually would have lived happily without docker on nixos for longer, but I had to use act for testing out github actions locally, so Docker was it's prerequisite.

So let's see how I installed Docker on NixOS.

Actually it was easier than expected.

There is a great docs page - https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Docker

The only things I did was:

# install docker
virtualisation.docker.enable = true;
users.extraGroups.docker.members = [ "yournixosusername" ];

Did:

• sudo nixos-rebuild switch,
• rebooted the system for group changes to take effect with sudo reboot
• checked if my user belongs to docker group with groups
• then finally the docker status docker ps, docker images
• last confirmation that you can read the docekr status - sudo systemctl status docker

When I saw that they do,I tried these steps of Docker test container creation.

When this worked also, I knew I am set and ready to work with Docker from inside of nixos.