Connect to remote Docker Swarm from Windows

Question

I would like to connect to a remote Docker Swarm (Ubuntu) from a Windows box. In Linux it seams that you need to update the daemon.json file. How do you achieve this in Windows?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The Docker engine has two parts, the daemon service (dockerd) that's running on your Ubuntu box, we'll call it the "server". Then the docker cli is what you can run from that server (docker) or from anything like your Windows machine (docker.exe). We'll call this the "client".

The client can talk to the server over two main ways, the socket, and a TCP port. The socket is usually reserved for local connections (SSH into the server and the docker client defaults to using the socket file to talk to the local server) or SSH tunnels, which are not something that works out of the box on Windows (maybe if you try the Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10).

The other connection option is TCP, which isn't enabled on the server out of the box for security reasons. It has no authentication when enabled, so you'll want to use TLS to authenticate remotely, so Docker has steps for that . It's not a 3 min solution, so many look for an easier route to solve this problem.

The easier option for enabling TLS and the TCP port on the server is to use Docker Cloud with the "Bring Your Own Swarm" feature , which manages the certificates and security for you.