Oracle Linux - getting newer versions of Docker via yum

When using Oracle Linux to run Docker you might depend by default on the Oracle YUM repository. While this is perfectly fine, the Oracle repository might be running behind with the mainstream Docker versions and you will not by default get the latest versions of Docker. As Docker introduces a lot of new features per version and you want to be using the latest stable version the way to go is to use a Docker owned repository.

For Oracle Linux 6 there is a specific repository provided by Docker. you can use this as an addition to the standard Oracle Linux repositories. The example below showcases a docker.repo file located in /etc/yum.repos.d/

[dockerrepo]
name=Docker Repository
baseurl=https://yum.dockerproject.org/repo/main/oraclelinux/6/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://yum.dockerproject.org/gpg

If you have this file available YUM will be checking this repository when you want to install (or update) docker to a newer version, which in some cases is a newer version than would be availabel via the public-yum.oracle.com repository.