Running Sitecore on Docker CE (Community Edition)

Two good reasons for switching from Docker Desktop: No paid license required, and better performance.

It’s Docker time!

In a previous post I went through reasons why incorporating Docker into your Sitecore workflow is a good idea. This post is an updated guide to running Docker CE instead of Docker Desktop, as some of the older guides I have found are outdated and there is a much easier, scripted way. This approach works for both Sitecore XM/XP and Sitecore XM Cloud.

The main up-side of Docker Desktop is having a GUI to help you navigate your containers and images. But honestly 99% of the time I find I don’t even use the GUI for anything so for me it was an easy switch.

The performance improvement I have noticed from switching to Docker CE is that on recent versions of Docker Desktop it seems to use up a lot of extra CPU doing who knows what, by going back to the basics with Docker CE we remove that overhead.

Uninstalling Docker Desktop (only if you have it installed)

If you have Docker Desktop installed, you need to uninstall it as follows as it will conflict with Docker CE if you have it. If you don’t have Docker Desktop then skip this.

1. Open Powershell as Administrator and run the below.
2. ./down.ps1 (or docker compose down)

2. docker system prune -a

3. Add or Remove Programs -> Uninstall Docker

4. rm C:\ProgramData\DockerDesktop

5. rm C:\Program Files\Docker

6. rm C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Docker

7. rm C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Docker

8. rm C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Docker Desktop

9. rm C:\Users\<username>\.docker

Steps to install Docker CE on Windows

1. Open Powershell as Administrator and run the below. This script will download the Docker Engine and Docker CLI and add it as a Windows service for you.

Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/Windows-Containers/Main/helpful_tools/Install-DockerCE/install-docker-ce.ps1" -o install-docker-ce.ps1
.\install-docker-ce.ps1 -DockerVersion "25.0.5"

2. Run docker version and ensure no errors.

3. Install the docker compose plugin:

[System.IO.Directory]::CreateDirectory('$Env:ProgramFiles\Docker\cli-plugins')
Invoke-WebRequest "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v2.24.7/docker-compose-windows-x86_64.exe" -UseBasicParsing -OutFile $Env:ProgramFiles\Docker\cli-plugins\docker-compose.exe

4. Run docker compose version and ensure no errors.

You will possibly need to restart your machine after installing docker and docker compose to have the path variables work from within terminals.

If you run into any errors, then first Google or otherwise ask on the Sitecore Slack #docker channel.

And that’s it, you can go to your repo and run up.ps1 as normal.

In general we don’t need to update docker as we are sticking with a version tried and tested to work with Sitecore on Windows. If you really need to update, best to save time and check on the Sitecore Slack #docker channel first for the best compatible version.