Simple Guide on Docker Containers for Dynamics 365 Business Central Consultants

Docker Containers Guide for BC Consultants

This post is a super simple step-by-step guide on how to run BC in a Docker contanier on your local machine. 

One reason to do this is that it's now very easy to access the 'Insider' versions of BC, to check out new features. Warning - Insider versions may have features that are different or missing in the final released versions!

Here is an older post on the topic Business Central Insider Releases Artifacts | Roberto Stefanetti Business Central Blog (robertostefanettinavblog.com)

A few things have changed since the above post, namily you dont need an access key to get the insider versions!

Seting up Docker for BC

Running a container-based development environment - Business Central | Microsoft Learn

Here are the simplified steps

You will want the x86_64 version if you are using a normal PC
  • When runing the installer - uncheck the "Use WSL" option, as we need to use Hyper-V  
  • All being well you will see this 
  • Make sure you have Hyper-V enabeled on your machine, go to the 'old' control pannel and search for 'features', make sure all the Hyper-V features are turned on. 
  • Start Docker Desktop, you may get an error, but you can ignore this and just switch to Windows containers, right click the notification area icon to see the switch action.
  • With Docker running in Hyper-V mode you are ready for the next step of creating a new BC containter!

Create a new BC Container in Docker 

Thankfully the process is mostly automated, we just need to get a PowerShell comandlet and create a small powershell script. 

Here is the way I've done that, there are a number of other blogs with variations on this process! Create a Docker for Business Central using BCContainerHelper (dynamics.com), 

  • Open 'Windows PowerShell ISE' using the "Run as Admin" option

  • Install  BC-ContainerHelper 
install-module BCContainerHelper -force

  • Now we can use the new command to create a BC container for us, there are a few options so its best to create a scrip file; here is a sample 
Code sample:
  • Click NEW, paste the code in the window, click RUN
  • Once the scrip has run, which can take 10-20 mins depending on your machine, it should look like this:
  • Check your docker window, you should have one named bcinsider25, click the name to view the log and then cick the Web Client URL to open BC!

  • Login with username:admin, password: admin



Thats it - have fun!

Containers are a great way to check out the new features and try out some simple dev. 

When running on your local machine you do miss some of the platfom features like copilot and any integrations to the wider power platform so there is still a place for SaaS CDX demo environments!

Other Handy Links/Bits


PS script to create a container with the latest 'released' GB version of BC:

PS Script to add a few more users - for example if you are testing BC Approvals. 
  • Just update that first param to the correct name of your container - in the example below I'm adding users to a container called 'bcserver'
  • In each case the password is the same as the user name to keep things simple!

What do you think?

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments

Connect or follow me on LinkedIn to get all my updates Andrew Wingate | LinkedIn