Docker Machine allows you to provision Docker machines in a variety of environments, including virtual machines that reside on your local system, on cloud providers, or on bare metal servers (physical computers). Docker Machine creates a Docker host, and you use the Docker Engine client as needed to build images and create containers on the host.
## Drivers for creating machines
To create a virtual machine, you supply Docker Machine with the name of the driver you want use. The driver determines where the virtual machine is created. For example, on a local Mac or Windows system, the driver is typically Oracle VirtualBox. For provisioning physical machines, a generic driver is provided. For cloud providers, Docker Machine supports drivers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, and many more. The Docker Machine reference includes a complete [list of supported drivers](drivers/index.md).
## Default base operating systems for local and cloud hosts
Since Docker runs on Linux, each VM that Docker Machine provisions relies on a
base operating system. For convenience, there are default base operating
systems. For the Oracle Virtual Box driver, this base operating system is <a href="https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker" target="_blank">boot2docker</a>. For drivers used to connect to cloud providers, the base operating system is Ubuntu 12.04+. You can change this default when you create a machine. The Docker Machine reference includes a complete [list of
supported operating systems](drivers/os-base.md).
## IP addresses for Docker hosts
For each machine you create, the Docker host address is the IP address of the
Linux VM. This address is assigned by the `docker-machine create` subcommand.
You use the `docker-machine ls` command to list the machines you have created.
The `docker-machine ip <machine-name>` command returns a specific host's IP
address.
## Configuring CLI environment variables for a Docker host
Before you can run a `docker` command on a machine, you need to configure your
command-line to point to that machine. The `docker-machine env <machine-name>`
subcommand outputs the configuration command you should use.
For a complete list of `docker-machine` subcommands, see the [Docker Machine subcommand reference](reference/index.md).
## Crash Reporting
Provisioning a host is a complex matter that can fail for a lot of reasons. Your
workstation may have a wide variety of shell, network configuration, VPN, proxy
or firewall issues. There are also reasons from the other end of the chain:
your cloud provider or the network in between.
To help `docker-machine` be as stable as possible, we added a monitoring of
crashes whenever you try to `create` or `upgrade` a host. This will send, over
HTTPS, to Bugsnag some information about your `docker-machine` version, build,
OS, ARCH, the path to your current shell and, the history of the last command as
you could see it with a `--debug` option. This data is sent to help us pinpoint
recurring issues with `docker-machine` and will only be transmitted in the case
of a crash of `docker-machine`.
If you wish to opt out of error reporting, you can create a `no-error-report`
file in your `$HOME/.docker/machine` directory, and Docker Machine will disable
