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This is the question regarding running Docker from within WSL, without Docker Desktop. It is doable for WSL2, so the focus of this question is on WSL1 specifically. Of my researches,

  • Some says "the Docker daemon cannot run directly on WSL", while
  • Another article says Docker can be run "seamlessly in Windows Subsystem Linux", with the help of Docker Community Edition 17.09.0, as "A crucial change was made to the WSL kernel that enables the usage of cgroups which Docker needs to manage your system’s resources into containers."

My docker is 20.10.5 under debian bullseye. Would it be still good?

I tried it, and got:

iptables can't initialize iptables table `nat': Table does not exist

and the answer to Iptables v1.6.1 can't initialize iptables table `filter' Ubuntu 18.04 Bash Windows is that,

According to the Microsoft WSL page on github.com, iptables isn't supported.

https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/767

But that's more than 4 years ago, and since it has been possible later in year 2019, I'm wondering what the latest status is.

xpt
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1 Answers1

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WSL1 - The little engine that could (link included since that reference may only be understood by a limited audience).

Unfortunately, in the case of Docker, the WSL1 engine seems to have run out of steam. In reading that blog post that you reference, and the corresponding Github thread, I'm pretty amazed at just how far along folks did get with running Docker. I had never seen that before.

However, if you read the full comments on the Github thread, it appears that the results were fairly limited. Placing these excerpts in order:

[2018-04-23] I'm glad to say Docker daemon finally runs on WSL. I'm testing on build 17134. ... The last docker-ce version that works right now on build 17134 is 17.09.0. Anything after that fails on extracting the docker images.

Note that it had to (and still has to) be run in a WSL1 instance running as a Windows admin.

[2018-0612] Unfortunately, docker-compose still doesn't work.... There is a problem with iptables which is not fully supported via WSL yet.

(Which you've run into, although I didn't see that. Perhaps the "admin" thing?)

[2018-07-09] Yeah, I recently mentioned it on Twitter and got a major "we aren't supporting this, we highly advise against it" message from our former WSL PM.

[2018-11-13] WSL PM here. As mentioned in the above comment, we have improved Docker support in recent builds of WSL. Most (if not all) versions of docker-ce work with WSL. We're working on a large set of changes for WSL currently. As part of those changes, we are looking at adding native Docker support in WSL. I will add to this thread and other issues on Docker support when I have additional updates to share

It doesn't seem like this ever progressed, since the PM never posted again in the thread, at least.

[2019-04-18] Like others have pointed out, running docker 17.09 works. Anything later fails with different errors. It might be that newer docker versions are using other syscalls not yet implemented by WSL.

There are some other messages scattered in here about running with --network host (for the client) or --iptables=false (for the daemon).

[2019-08-04] Windows Insider Fast Ring build (>=18917) via WSL2, latest docker/docker-compose is running native in WSL Linux.

And in late 2020, the thread died off.

In a test WSL1 Ubuntu 20.04 instance, I was able to get hello-world running, but nothing more. Running a busybox or ubuntu image (with or without an interactive terminal) failed with:

Error response from daemon: failed to create shim task: OCI runtime create failed: runc create failed: unable to start container process: waiting for init preliminary setup: EOF: unknown.

Once the focused shifted to WSL2 and the real kernel, it doesn't appear to me that the WSL team has made any more progress advancing WSL1's pseudo-kernel syscall translation layer.

NotTheDr01ds
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