CircleCi: Couldn't connect to Docker daemon at http+docker://localhost

Question

In my Node.js project tests I'm starting docker-compose via child_process.spawn.

When running CircleCi, the build fails with this error:

Couldn't connect to Docker daemon at http+docker://localhost - is it running?

This is the .circleci/config.yml:

version: 2
jobs:
  build:
    docker:
      # specify the version you desire here
      - image: circleci/node:8

    working_directory: ~/repo

    steps:
      - checkout

      # Download and cache dependencies
      - restore_cache:
          keys:
          - v1-dependencies-{{ checksum "package.json" }}
          # fallback to using the latest cache if no exact match is found
          - v1-dependencies-

      - run: npm install

      - save_cache:
          paths:
            - node_modules
          key: v1-dependencies-{{ checksum "package.json" }}

      # run tests!
      - run: npm test

Answer 1

Just recently ran into this issue, I believe. I think the only thing missing from your setup is setup_remote_docker before running anything that uses docker-compose. For example:

working_directory: ~/repo

steps:
  # ...

  - setup_remote_docker

  # run tests!
  - run: npm test

Hope this helps!