docker command not found

In this troubleshooting guide we learn how to fix docker command not found error message

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

docker: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: docker: command not found

In Ubuntu docker is provided by podman-docker package.

podman-docker is:

Podman is an engine for running OCI-based containers in Pods. Podman provides a CLI interface for managing Pods, Containers, and Container Images.

At a high level, the scope of libpod and podman is the following:

Support multiple image formats including the OCI and Docker image formats.
Support for multiple means to download images including trust & image verification.
Container image management (managing image layers, overlay filesystems, etc).
Full management of container lifecycle.
Support for pods to manage groups of containers together.
Resource isolation of containers and pods.
Support for a Docker-compatible CLI interface through Podman.

Podman is a daemon-less alternative to Docker.

This package installs a wrapper script that acts like the original docker implementation

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install podman-docker

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install podman-docker.

sudo apt -y install podman-docker

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install podman-docker

In this tutorial we learn how to fix docker command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.