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Docker Platform

Introduction

To install the SMath Local Licensing Server on a server in your organization's network, that server needs the Docker platform installed.

Docker is a platform for packaging applications together with everything they need to run — code, runtime, libraries and configuration — into self-contained units called containers. Unlike a virtual machine, a container does not carry its own operating system: it shares the kernel of the host and isolates only the application and its dependencies, which makes containers lightweight and fast to start. A container is created from an image, a read-only template that can be built from a simple text file (a Dockerfile), stored in a registry and distributed to any machine where Docker is installed. Because the image fixes the entire environment, the application behaves identically on a developer's laptop, on a build server and in production, which removes the familiar class of problems caused by differences between environments.

Supported platforms

Today Docker is available on all major software platforms. Containers are native to Linux, where the engine runs directly on the host kernel, and it is supported by every mainstream distribution as well as by the common ARM64 and x86-64 architectures. On Windows and macOS the same workflow is provided by Docker Desktop, which transparently runs Linux containers inside a lightweight virtual machine; Windows additionally supports native Windows containers for applications built on the .NET Framework and other Windows-only components. The command-line interface, the Dockerfile format and the images themselves are the same everywhere, so a container built on one platform can be run on any other without modification.

Our recommendations

As noted above, Docker runs on a wide range of platforms, and our images are expected to work on any of them. For the SMath Local Licensing Server specifically, see its System Requirements for the exact Linux distributions and Docker/Docker Compose version combinations we've tested — this is the configuration we can support with the highest confidence. Other distributions and platforms remain perfectly usable, but they are not part of our regular pre-release testing.

Official documentation on Docker platform is available here: https://www.docker.com/