How to install docker on GitHub Actions

Question

What is the official / recommended way to install Docker on GitHub Actions?

In particular I need to run a custom script on GitHub Actions that, among other tasks, calls docker build and docker push.

I don't want pre-made actions that build/push, I want to have access to the docker command.

What should I do?

The only official action that I can find uses Docker Buildx and not the normal docker: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/build-and-push-docker-images

Beside that I can find this action (https://github.com/marketplace/actions/setup-docker) but I don't know if I can trust that source, since it's not official.

Any recommendations? How do you install the docker command on GitHub Actions?

Discomfort

It seems Docker is already installed on the Github Runners (you can see it here for ubuntu-latest). I performed a test just running docker --version without any setup and it returned Docker version 20.10.14+azure-1, build a224086349269551becacce16e5842ceeb2a98d6 as you can see in this workflow run – Sun

Answer 1

Docker is already available in the default ubuntu images.

You can find all the installed software in actions/runner-images.

It looks like Windows and Mac images do not have the Docker client installed: Search results.

This is a valid CI that I use in my workflow:

name: Check that image builds
on:
  pull_request:

jobs:
  test-image:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Check that the image builds
        run: docker build . --file Dockerfile

Stipend