One of the reasons Kubernetes has won so much support, is its great orchestration abilities. However, Docker has been making a lot of fuss over Swarm, its native orchestration tool. Unfortunately, this is still in the beta channel of Docker 1.12, and as such is not installed by default on your CoreOS system.

Update CoreOS Docker

To update your CoreOS system, you need to switch to the beta channel, which can be done by updating the update.conf file. Possible values are ‘stable’, ‘beta’, and ‘alpha’. We’re going to use ‘beta’:

$ sudo sh -c 'echo GROUP=beta > /etc/coreos/update.conf'

..and force the update:

$ update_engine_client -update

Voila! Your system will be running the latest version of Docker, including Docker Swarm. You can verify the version if you desire:

$ docker version

You should be on at least docker 1.12.1.

Adding Docker Compose

If you want to make full use of the new native orchestration tools, you’re going to want to be able to use docker compose, along with the bundling tool for use with deploying Docker Swarm Stacks & Bundles.

To install docker compose on CoreOS, throw the following few commands into your server:

$ mkdir /opt/ $ mkdir /opt/bin $ sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.9.0/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` > /opt/bin/docker-compose $ chmod +x /opt/bin/docker-compose

Check your version:

$ docker-compose -v

You should be on version 1.9.0 or later!