Cannot connect to the Docker daemon on bash on Ubuntu windows

Question

I am able to install docker, docker-compose and docker-machine

However when I try to run

root@DESKTOP-51NFMIM:~# docker ps
Cannot connect to the Docker d         


        

Answer 1

Note: if you are using the Ubuntu from WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), do understand that the docker client is working, not the docker server (daemon).

See Microsoft/WSL issue 2114 and this thread.

For the server, you would still need to use only Docker for Windows and its Hyper-V VM.

Then, Microsoft/WSL issue 2102 adds:

I was able to make TLS work from inside WSL by changing DOCKER_CERT_PATH environment variable (which I got from running eval $(docker-machine.exe env --shell bash)) from "C:\C:\Users\mmarchini\.docker\machine\machines\default" to "/mnt/c/Users/mmarchini/.docker/machine/machines/default/" .
At least docker build seems to be working now, I'll try using docker-compose later.

See this script (from Matheus Marchini) to launch a docker-machine bash with the right setting:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from subprocess import run, PIPE

completed_process = run(["docker-machine.exe", "env", "--shell", "bash"], stdout=PIPE)

docker_env = completed_process.stdout.decode("ascii")

for line in docker_env.split("\n"):
    if "DOCKER_CERT_PATH" in line:
        env_var, path, _ = line.split('"')
        path = path.replace("\\", "/")
        drive, path = path.split(":", 1)
        path = "/mnt/{}{}".format(drive.lower(), path)
        line = '{}"{}"'.format(env_var, path)
print(line)