Docker in docker devcontainer feature cannot connect to Docker daemon

Bluefin
1

Anyone successfully using docker in docker feature with devcontainers in VSCode? I get the following on both 41.20250105 and 41.20241215 when I use the docker ps command inside a devcontainer:

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?

It might be kernel related per the issue below, but I’ve rolled back to 41.20241215 (kernel 6.11.6-300) which doesn’t appear to resolve the problem.

2

I’m facing the same issue on 41.20250126.1

I tried mounting the Docker socket with

"mounts": [
		{
			"source": "/var/run/docker.sock",
			"target": "/var/run/docker.sock",
			"type": "bind"
		}
	]

Then, the reported error is

Error: permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket at unix:///var/run/docker.sock: 
dial unix /var/run/docker.sock: connect: permission denied

Within my devcontainer the user id looks like:

> id
uid=1000(node) gid=1000(node) groups=1000(node),102(docker),997(pipx),998(nvm),999(npm)

> whoami
node
3

I have the same issue. To get around it I used docker-outside-docker instead of docker-in-docker.

It doesn’t solve it, but it gets you unstuck.

features/src/docker-outside-of-docker at main · devcontainers/features

4

Same issue on 41.20250216.1.

5

Hmmm, for docker-in-docker, are we supposed to manually start the docker daemon within a devcontainer? Ran ‘sudo service docker start’ within the container and it works for my use cases.

Docker outside of docker also works nicely.