Rebooting your host machine or restarting the Docker service with systemctl restart docker can help alleviate transient issues too. When there’s no obvious resolution available, manually start the daemon in debugging mode to get more information on its startup routine.

You should review the service’s startup logs shown later in the systemctl command output as these usually contain hints that let you work out what went wrong. If you see a status of failed in red, the daemon couldn’t start due to an error. The status should change to active (running) after the daemon starts. Try to bring it up by running sudo systemctl start docker. sudo systemctl status dockerĬheck what’s displayed under “Active.” If you see active (running) in green, the Docker daemon is running and your containers should be up.Īn active state of inactive indicates the service has stopped. This covers the majority of popular operating systems including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Red Hat. You can check Docker’s status with systemctl on distributions that use Systemd for service management. When the daemon’s not running, you’ll see a “can’t connect to Docker daemon” message each time you use the docker CLI. Here’s how to check whether Docker’s daemon is up so you can diagnose issues with containers and the docker command. CLI commands won’t work and your containers will usually go offline if the daemon stops. Docker uses a daemon-based architecture where the CLI connects to a long-lived process running separately on your machine or a remote host.

Docker daemon logs systemctl