Machine lets you create Docker hosts on your computer, on cloud providers, and inside your own data center. It creates servers, installs Docker on them, then configures the Docker client to talk to them.
It works a bit like this:
$ docker-machine create -d virtualbox dev
Creating CA: /home/username/.docker/machine/certs/ca.pem
Creating client certificate: /home/username/.docker/machine/certs/cert.pem
Image cache does not exist, creating it at /home/username/.docker/machine/cache...
No default boot2docker iso found locally, downloading the latest release...
Downloading https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker/releases/download/v1.6.2/boot2docker.iso to /home/username/.docker/machine/cache/boot2docker.iso...
Creating VirtualBox VM...
Creating SSH key...
Starting VirtualBox VM...
Starting VM...
To see how to connect Docker to this machine, run: docker-machine env dev
$ docker-machine ls
NAME ACTIVE DRIVER STATE URL SWARM
dev * virtualbox Running tcp://192.168.99.127:2376
$ eval "$(docker-machine env dev)"
$ docker run busybox echo hello world
Unable to find image 'busybox:latest' locally
511136ea3c5a: Pull complete
df7546f9f060: Pull complete
ea13149945cb: Pull complete
4986bf8c1536: Pull complete
hello world
$ docker-machine create -d digitalocean --digitalocean-access-token=secret staging
Creating SSH key...
Creating Digital Ocean droplet...
To see how to connect Docker to this machine, run: docker-machine env staging
$ docker-machine ls
NAME ACTIVE DRIVER STATE URL SWARM
dev virtualbox Running tcp://192.168.99.127:2376
staging * digitalocean Running tcp://104.236.253.181:2376Full documentation is available here.
Want to hack on Machine? Please start with the Contributing Guide.