Running docker-compose against docker-in-docker (dind)

Question

In gitlab-ci, I am trying to run docker-compose within a Docker container. I am using Docker-in-Docker for this. To test that everything is working, I just execute a docker info command. However, when I use the docker-compose image as my image, I get the following error when executing docker info :

ERROR: Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at tcp://docker:2375. Is the docker daemon running?

If I use docker itself as the image, the docker info command succeeds. I'm confused by this since the docker-compose image is based on the docker image.

The following.gitlab-ci.yml results in an error from the docker info command:

image: docker/compose:debian-1.26.0

stages:
  - test

variables:
  DOCKER_DRIVER: overlay2
  DOCKER_TLS_CERTDIR: "/certs"

services:
 - docker:19.03.8-dind

test-provider:
  stage: test
  script:
    - docker info

If I change the image to docker:19.03.8 , the docker info command runs fine. Not sure what I'm doing wrong here.

Answer 1

Try to start dockerd in script section explicity. Also you can add script to wait when docker daemon starting succeed. Something like:

sudo dockerd & timeout -t 9 bash -c "while [ ! -S /var/run/docker.sock ]; do sleep 3 && ls -lah /var/run/; done" || exit 1