The easiest, and recommended, approach to set up Canasta installations is to use the Canasta CLI (command-line interface). It lets you install and use Canasta without having to know anything about Docker or Docker Compose. Then, once it is installed, the CLI can be used to easily create, import, start, stop, manage extension/skins, and back up Canasta installations.
Note: The Canasta CLI currently only supports installing the latest version of Canasta. Currently, the Canasta CLI only supports installing Canasta 3.0 (MediaWiki 1.43). If you want to install Canasta 1.2 (which uses MediaWiki 1.35), or Canasta 2.0 (which uses MediaWiki 1.39), follow the manual installation instructions.
Before using the Canasta CLI, you must have both Docker Engine and Docker Compose installed.
Docker Compose is included in Docker Desktop for Windows and macOS.
Linux is the most-tested and preferred OS environment as the host for Canasta. Installing the requirements is fast and easy to do on common Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and CentOS. While you can get up and running with all the Docker requirements by installing Docker Desktop on Linux, if you are using a 'server environment' (no GUI), the recommended way to install is to uninstall any distribution-specific software and install Docker software using the Docker repositories. (The link is the install guide for Docker Compose which will also install the Docker Engine.)
Essentially, preparing your Linux server to be a Canasta host by installing the Docker suite of software includes something like
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin once you've
added the Docker repositories to your system. A full example script for Ubuntu can be found at example-prepare-ubuntu-headless.sh
curl -fsL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CanastaWiki/Canasta-CLI/main/install.sh | bashsudo usage).