Hacker News Reader

You need to have access to the docker socket, if you're using sockets to connect. That's not necessarily only root.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12291092

True. I also work in a HPC context where that's a problem. That's actually a place where I had to hack together something with venv in order to use an output analysis with a python that's compiled differently from the main Fortran executable. But that's quite an edge case.

This is actually wrong. You can be added to the `docker` group. On Docker for OS X you also don't need root.

In general if a tool requires root to run, of course a system administrator could make some changes to the system to allow a user to run it (adding the user to a privileged group, making the binary setuid, etc).

But that's not the point. The point is, if I'm on a system where I don't have the ability to make system-wide changes (run docker as root, add myself to a special group, etc), then I can't run docker on that system.