docker-cli/components/engine/man

Docker Documentation

This directory contains the Docker user manual in the Markdown format. Do not edit the man pages in the man1 directory. Instead, amend the Markdown (*.md) files.

Generating man pages from the Markdown files

The recommended approach for generating the man pages is via a Docker container using the supplied Dockerfile to create an image with the correct environment. This uses go-md2man, a pure Go Markdown to man page generator.

Generate the man pages

On Linux installations, Docker includes a set of man pages you can access by typing man command-name on the command line. For example, man docker displays the docker man page. When using Docker on Mac OSX the man pages are not automatically included.

You can generate and install the man pages yourself by following these steps:

1. Checkout the docker source.

    $ git clone https://github.com/docker/docker.git
   

If you are using Boot2Docker, you must clone into your /Users directory because Boot2Docker can only share this path with the docker containers.

2. Build the docker image.

    $ cd docker/man
    $ docker build -t docker/md2man .
   

3. Build the man pages.

    $ docker run -v <path-to-git-dir>/docker/man:/man:rw -w /man -i docker/md2man /man/md2man-all.sh
   

The md2man Docker container processes the Markdown files and generates a man1 and man5 subdirectories in the docker/man directory.

4. Copy the generated man pages to /usr/share/man

    $ cp -R man* /usr/share/man/