By default, you have to run docker using sudo . When you try to run it without sudo, you will get $ docker images Got permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket In order to run without sudo, you will need to do the following steps Add the docker group if it does not already exist sudo groupadd docker Add the user to the docker group. If you want to add the current user, you can just use this sudo gpasswd -a $USER docker If you want to add, say user user1 , then you should just do sudo gpasswd -a user1 docker After you do the above steps, log out and now you can run docker without sudo .