Debian – docker.io package reports missing only on EC2

amazon ec2amazon-amiaptdebian

I'm trying to install Docker on a Debian Jessie EC2 image. Specifically, I'm using this AMI: https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/AmazonEC2Image/Jessie. On a locally running Debian machine sudo apt-get install docker.io does the trick. However, if I run that on an EC2 instance booted from the official Debian EC2 AMI I get:

admin@ip-10-136-121-82:~$ sudo apt-get install docker.io
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package docker.io is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'docker.io' has no installation candidate

Things I've tried:

  • Running apt-get update before the above install command
  • Changing /etc/apt/sources.list so it's identical to what I'm using successfully locally, then apt-get update and then retry the install
  • apt-get dist-upgrade, a reboot, and then retrying the install

None of the above work. At this point my best guess is that the AMI uses a different, Xen compatible kernel which isn't Docker compatible and somehow apt is smart enough to know that and hide incompatible packages, but that's a wild guess and, if correct, I don't know of a good way to correct that and still use the official Debian AMI.

any help?

Best Answer

Turns out jessie removed docker.io today and not all repos had updated when I did these experiments. To make things extra confusing, http.docker.net is really a broker service that sends you to other mirrors so EC2 was seeing one, up to date, mirror while my local box was seeing a mirror that still had docker.io available.

Package history: https://packages.qa.debian.org/d/docker.io.html

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