Accessing Docker Over SSH

In Docker 18.09, the Docker CLI was updated to support remote connections over SSH. If your local machine and the remote machine have a Docker version higher than 18.09, you can run docker commands over SSH.

If you are using the docker CLI directly, you can pass the -H or --host flag to run commands like this:

$ docker -H ssh://cam@testing ps -a
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE         COMMAND     CREATED         STATUS                     PORTS     NAMES
b86624ce8dac   alpine:3.20   "/bin/sh"   3 seconds ago   Exited (0) 2 seconds ago             hello_from_testing

You can also override the DOCKER_HOST environment variable to accomplish the same thing. This is particularly useful if you aren’t using the Docker CLI directly, but rather another tool like lazydocker.

❯ DOCKER_HOST=ssh://cam@testing docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE         COMMAND     CREATED          STATUS                     PORTS     NAMES
b7f8bf27efb3   alpine:3.20   "/bin/sh"   10 seconds ago   Exited (0) 9 seconds ago             hello_from_testing

You can also just export the overridden variable to persist the value when you want to run multiple commands,

$ export DOCKER_HOST=ssh://cam@testing
$ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE         COMMAND     CREATED         STATUS                     PORTS     NAMES
40c70193bd5e   alpine:3.20   "/bin/sh"   3 seconds ago   Exited (0) 2 seconds ago             hello_from_testing

$ docker rm hello_from_testing
hello_from_testing

$ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE     COMMAND   CREATED   STATUS    PORTS     NAMES