How To Install CRI-O on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install CRI-O on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, CRI-O is an open-source container engine and an alternative to the Docker engine. It is a lightweight container runtime environment. A container runtime is software that is responsible for running the containers.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the CRI-O on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install CRI-O on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg2 software-properties-common

Step 2. Installing CRI-O on Ubuntu 22.04.

By default, CRI-O is not available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to add the CRI-O repository configuration package:

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/libcontainers-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/$OS_VERSION/ /" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable.list
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/libcontainers-crio-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable:/cri-o:/$CRIO_VERSION/$OS_VERSION/ /" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable:cri-o:$CRIO_VERSION.list

Next, import the GPG keys:

curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/$OS_VERSION/Release.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/libcontainers-archive-keyring.gpg
curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable:/cri-o:/$CRIO_VERSION/$OS_VERSION/Release.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/libcontainers-crio-archive-keyring.gpg

After the repository is enabled, now install the latest version of the CRI-O package using the below command:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install cri-o cri-o-runc

Once successfully installed, enable CRI-O (to start automatically upon system boot), start, and verify the status using the commands below:

sudo systemctl enable crio
sudo systemctl start crio
sudo systemctl status crio

Step 3. Installing CNI (Container Network Interface) Plugins For CRI-O.

Run the following command to install CNI plugins:

sudo apt install containernetworking-plugins

Step 4. Using CRI-O on Ubuntu 22.04.

First, we install CRI Tools to manage pods and containers:

sudo apt install cri-tools

Check existence of crictl command:

$ sudo crictl info
{
  "status": {
    "conditions": [
      {
        "type": "RuntimeReady",
        "status": true,
        "reason": "",
        "message": ""
      },
      {
        "type": "NetworkReady",
        "status": false,
        "reason": "NetworkPluginNotReady",
        "message": "Network plugin returns error: Missing CNI default network"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Next, pull a test Nginx image from Docker Hub:

sudo crictl pull nginx

Check available images:

sudo crictl images

Congratulations! You have successfully installed CRI-O. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the CRI-O on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official CRI-O website.