Errors installing Docker 18.09 on systemd systems

[nre-ableton]

When using this role on a freshly-deployed Ubuntu 16.04 host, we are getting the following error:

Unable to restart service docker: Job for docker.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See \"systemctl status docker.service\" and \"journalctl -xe\" for details.\n

[geerlingguy]

Yeah, I'm also getting that with Docker 18.09 on 18.04, CentOS 7, Debian 9, and basically everywhere. I think something in 18.09 is blowing everything up.

Looking in the logs, I see:

Nov 12 22:55:11 instance systemd[1]: Starting containerd container runtime...
-- Subject: Unit containerd.service has begun start-up
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit containerd.service has begun starting up.
Nov 12 22:55:11 instance systemd[1]: Starting Docker Application Container Engine...
-- Subject: Unit docker.service has begun start-up
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit docker.service has begun starting up.
Nov 12 22:55:11 instance systemd[1]: containerd.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1
Nov 12 22:55:11 instance systemd[1]: Failed to start containerd container runtime.
-- Subject: Unit containerd.service has failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit containerd.service has failed.
-- 
-- The result is failed.
Nov 12 22:55:11 instance systemd[1]: Dependency failed for Docker Application Container Engine.
-- Subject: Unit docker.service has failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit docker.service has failed.
-- 
-- The result is dependency.
Nov 12 22:55:11 instance systemd[1]: Job docker.service/start failed with result 'dependency'.
Nov 12 22:55:11 instance systemd[1]: Unit containerd.service entered failed state.
Nov 12 22:55:11 instance systemd[1]: containerd.service failed.
Nov 12 22:55:11 instance systemd[1]: Stopped Docker Application Container Engine.
-- Subject: Unit docker.service has finished shutting down
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit docker.service has finished shutting down.

So... there's some dependency issue in 18.09 :/

[geerlingguy]

Related: containerd/containerd#2772

[geerlingguy]

And the fix is here: containerd/containerd#2776

See also: docker/for-linux#475

It seems like we might just need to wait for a new release? Otherwise I'd have to either hack the containerd unit file, or get that modprobe command to work.

[geerlingguy]

So... I don't know what to do currently. I could patch around this at least temporarily using the hack overriding the ExecStartPre command as suggested in the docker/for-linux issue linked in the previous comment, but that feels annoying and pointless since the next release will fix this issue.

But I hate failing builds, and I'm now up to 5 public GitHub projects and 2 private ones which have failing builds... and I hate failing builds.

[geerlingguy]

Also possibly related?

• Document DinD modprobe gotcha docker-library/docker#86
• Add "ip link show" based modprobe tricks docker-library/docker#90

[nre-ableton]

@geerlingguy Thanks for the quick fix and the investigations! 👍