Java Docker API Client. To start using docker-java , you need to add at least two dependencies. You will need an instance of DockerClientConfig to tell the library how to access Docker, which credentials to use to pull from Docker registries, etc. The builder is available and allows you to configure every property of the client. Should you need to customize the Jackson's ObjectMapper used by docker-java, you can create your own DockerClientConfig. Once you decided which transport to use, you will need to instantiate an HTTP client. Once you have an HTTP client, you can make raw requests to the Docker daemon directly. To get an instance of DockerClient, you need to pass both DockerClientConfig and DockerHttpClient.