Docker daemon "unknown: Authentication is required" message

Question

I installed docker-toolbox on my Mac.

I ran the following command to login to our private registry (JFrog Artifactory 4.1). Provided username, email and password when requested and login succeeded.

docker login <registry url>

This created a file ~/.docker/config.json on my system having some representation of my credentials.

Pulling and pushing images worked fine for a while. At some point later, when i tried to pull an image, i ended up with the following

b745547eea8f: Retrying in 1 second
8e68617bcad0: Retrying in 1 second
d0a4a553178b: Retrying in 1 second 
4ef6bb1e3944: Retrying in 1 second 
5f70bf18a086: Retrying in 1 second 
69bd93b9db4e: Waiting
unknown: Authentication is required

Retried multiple times with no luck. Ran "docker login" again and retried. Same issue was seen for 2-3 minutes. After 2-3 minutes, "docker pull" worked.

Questions:

• After ~/.docker/config.json file is created, do these credentials expire after a certain amount of time? If yes, how can i increase the expiration time.
• Why did "docker pull" fail for first 2-3 minutes after logging in for the second time. Does this have anything to do with time on my local machine and VM on VirtualBox created by docker-toolbox?

We are about to open our private registry to everyone in our company. Don't want people to face these things while pulling images.

Answer 1

Your URL might be the culprit here. Since you didn't include it, it is hard to tell whether you used something like this:

https://artifactory.company.com (correct)

or this:

artifactory.company.com:443 (incorrect)

I have experienced that using a login URL like artifactory.company.com:443 will login successfully, but will have strange problems, such as preventing images from being pushed to Artifactory.

If this happens, either delete the file .docker/config.json and login again, or edit it, changing: artifactory.company.com:443 to https://artifactory.company.com

Answer 2

Upgrading to latest version of Artifactory (4.10) helped. Didn't see this issue after that.