install-docker-linux-mint-18_2

Instructions for how to install Docker CE on Linux Mint 18.2

The problem

I attempted to install Docker CE on my Linux Mint 18.2 laptop following these instructions provided by Docker. However, I kept getting the following error after running the sudo apt-get install docker-ce command:

$ sudo apt-get install docker-ce
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package docker-ce

The reason

The reason this happens is because the $(lsb_release -cs) string evaluates to sonya in Linux Mint. Instead, we need it to evaulate to xenial, which is the code name of the Ubuntu distribution that Linux Mint 18.2 is based on.

The fix

The fix is to insert xenial instead of $(lsb_release -cs).

The modified setup instructions are:

$ sudo apt-get remove docker docker-engine docker.io
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install \
    apt-transport-https \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    software-properties-common
$ curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
# This line changed
$ sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu xenial stable"
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install docker-ce
$ sudo docker run hello-world