Tell us about your request
It should be possible to start Docker Desktop on windows at startup without having to log in first.
Which service(s) is this request for?
Docker for Windows
Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve. What are you trying to do, and why is it hard?
After a long and frustrating search, I came to the conclusion that it is currently impossible to start Docker Desktop or the docker engine at startup on windows without logging with a user.
Solutions I found on internet were either to configure a task to launch Docker Desktop at startup or to use the daemon as a service that automatically start. None of these seem to work anymore, because now Docker Desktop must be run in interactive mode and it seems that starting dockerd alone don't work with windows, or at least is not supposed to be used that way.
I understand there is a security issue of being able to run docker without logging first, but it makes it impossible to run applications in production reliably using docker, as a server reboot will make them inaccessible until someone actively logs into the server and start Docker Desktop.
This can lead to frequent application outages, that are easily fixed (providing there is someone available and authorized to log into the server and start Docker Desktop), but hinders productivity and customer satisfaction.
There are other cases when this is inconvenient, such as using docker to do CI.
We should be able to automatically start Docker Desktop at server startup in production.
Are you currently working around the issue?
As far as I know from my research, the only workaround is to automatically logs a user at startup, but the security implications are way worse so we didn't do that.
Additional context
Docker Desktop v4.21.1
Windows Server 2022
Tell us about your request
It should be possible to start Docker Desktop on windows at startup without having to log in first.
Which service(s) is this request for?
Docker for Windows
Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve. What are you trying to do, and why is it hard?
After a long and frustrating search, I came to the conclusion that it is currently impossible to start Docker Desktop or the docker engine at startup on windows without logging with a user.
Solutions I found on internet were either to configure a task to launch Docker Desktop at startup or to use the daemon as a service that automatically start. None of these seem to work anymore, because now Docker Desktop must be run in interactive mode and it seems that starting dockerd alone don't work with windows, or at least is not supposed to be used that way.
I understand there is a security issue of being able to run docker without logging first, but it makes it impossible to run applications in production reliably using docker, as a server reboot will make them inaccessible until someone actively logs into the server and start Docker Desktop.
This can lead to frequent application outages, that are easily fixed (providing there is someone available and authorized to log into the server and start Docker Desktop), but hinders productivity and customer satisfaction.
There are other cases when this is inconvenient, such as using docker to do CI.
We should be able to automatically start Docker Desktop at server startup in production.
Are you currently working around the issue?
As far as I know from my research, the only workaround is to automatically logs a user at startup, but the security implications are way worse so we didn't do that.
Additional context
Docker Desktop v4.21.1
Windows Server 2022