Hi guys, I have no problem running docker (containers) via CLI, but I though it would be nice try Docker Desktop on my Ubuntu machine. But as soon as I start Docker Desktop it runs “starting Docker engine” indefinitely until my drive is full. The .docker folder then is about 70GB large. I read somewhere that this is the virtual disk size that is being created and that I could change it in the settings, but those are blocked until the engine starting process is finished (which it never does). Anyone else has experienced this?
Usually in my experience docker puts its images in /var/lib/docker. If your /var is on its own partition, or overall your disk space isn’t big enough you’ll have a bad time.
If you have other partitions with spare room, you can move the subdir docker from /var/lib to the other partition/drive, then symlink /var/lib/docker to that.
You’re on Linux. You can install docker without the fancy desktop GUI. Just install the CLI.
Yeah this is a common issue with docker. If you can get away with running the underlying tool without docker I would almost always recommend that instead.
Docker Desktop on ubuntu? I didn’t even know it ran on Ubuntu.
Check your system logs journalctl --pager-end and search for docker. If you haven’t used it before enter ?docker and hit enter. That’ll search backwards for docker. Or open journalctl --follow in one window and watch the logs, then do what you did before.
Honestly though, I’d not use docker desktop and use straight docker in the command line. I have no idea what Docker Desktop on linux is for as you have to run docker compose up and docker run in the command line anyway, right?
Can you find out what files are being created? My host disk usually fill up with logs from containers if I don’t specify a max log size.
