This tutorial will show you how to run OPM Flow in a docker container. A large benefit of using a docker container is that you have an easy way to run the most recent version of Flow on Linux machines without precompiled binary packages. It is also very easy to remove from your system, should you not want to have it installed.

It is possible to run this tutorial on modern Windows computers as well as on macOS. However, Docker for Windows has a set of requirements that have to be fulfilled, so not all computers will easily run Docker.

A thorough discussion of containers is outside the scope of this tutorial, but a Docker container can be thought of as something similar to a virtual machine. The major difference is that a container is slightly less flexible, but much smaller in size, and with far less overhead than a virtual machine. So whilst running OPM Flow in a virtual machine will impose a performance penalty, doing so from a Docker container will be more or less as fast as running directly in your operating system.