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Could not find a valid Docker environment

· One min read
Haril Song
Haril Song
Owner, Software Engineer at 42dot

Overview​

After updating my Mac and finding that Docker was not working properly, I had to reinstall it. However, I encountered an error where the container was not running properly when running tests.

It turned out that there was an issue with the /var/run/docker.sock not being properly configured. Here, I will share the solution to resolve this issue.

Description​

This problem occurs in Docker desktop version 4.13.0.

By default Docker will not create the /var/run/docker.sock symlink on the host and use the docker-desktop CLI context instead. (see: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/release-notes/)

You can check the current Docker context using docker context ls, which will display something like this:

NAME                TYPE                DESCRIPTION                               DOCKER ENDPOINT                                KUBERNETES ENDPOINT                                 ORCHESTRATOR
default             moby                Current DOCKER_HOST based configuration   unix:///var/run/docker.sock                    https://kubernetes.docker.internal:6443 (default)   swarm
desktop-linux *     moby                                                          unix:///Users/<USER>/.docker/run/docker.sock

To fix the issue, either set the default context or connect to unix:///Users/<USER>/.docker/run/docker.sock.

Solution​

Try running the following command to switch to the default context and check if Docker works properly:

docker context use default

If the issue persists, you can manually create a symbolic link to resolve it with the following command:

sudo ln -svf /Users/<USER>/.docker/run/docker.sock /var/run/docker.sock

Reference​