How to Install Docker EE on Windows Server 2016 | Offline

Ashish Singh Baghel
2 min readOct 31, 2020

Recently I was learning docker on Windows Server 2016 and I realized that official docker docs no longer have information for Docker EE on Windows Server 2016

Microsoft official documentation link for scripted installation of Docker EE is broken.

You can use following instructions to Install latest Docker EE on Windows Server 2016

Note: Use PowerShell as an administrator to run below commands

If you need to download a specific Docker Enterprise Engine release, all URLs can be found on this JSON index.

https://dockermsft.blob.core.windows.net/dockercontainer/DockerMsftIndex.json

Asof 31 Oct 2020, docker-19.03.12 is the latest release.

On an online machine, download the zip file.

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12Invoke-WebRequest -OutFile docker-19.03.12.zip https://dockermsft.azureedge.net/dockercontainer/docker-19-03-12.zip

Copy this zip file to offline Windows Server 2016

Stop Docker service if earlier version of Docker is already installed

Stop-Service docker

Extract the archive.

Expand-Archive docker-19.03.12.zip -DestinationPath $Env:ProgramFiles -Force

Clean up the zip file.

Remove-Item -Force docker-19.03.12.zip

Install Docker. This requires rebooting.

$null = Install-WindowsFeature containersRestart-Computer -Force

Add Docker to the path for the current session.

$env:path += “;$env:ProgramFiles\docker”

Optionally, modify PATH to persist across sessions.

$newPath = "$env:ProgramFiles\docker;" +[Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("PATH",[EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", $newPath,[EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)

Register the Docker daemon as a service.

dockerd --register-service

Start the Docker service.

Start-Service docker

Check if docker is running fine

docker version

Pull Windows base images for Windows Server 2016 from local docker registry in your network or from Docker Hub (docker hub requires internet connection)

# servercore on windows server 2016
docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2016
# nanoserver on windows server 2016
docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/windows/nanoserver:sac2016

Now your machine is good to run Windows Containers.

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