Building a Docker Image with the Spring Boot Gradle Plugin and Colima

Question

I'm trying to create a docker image of a Spring Boot application using the Gradle plugin. I'm using Spring Boot 2.6.4 and Gradle 7.1.1.

I'm on a Mac, and I don't have Docker Desktop installed. Indeed, I run docker using Colima.

The problem is that I cannot build the docker image with the command ./gradlew bootBuildImage since Gradle cannot find the docker daemon:

Connection to the Docker daemon at 'localhost' failed with error "[2] No such file or directory"; ensure the Docker daemon is running and accessible

Is there any configuration I have to do in Colima or my build.gradle file?

Answer 1

Colima creates a socket in the location ~/.colima/docker.sock by default. Running the command docker context ls should show a context named colima with the socket location shown in the DOCKER ENDPOINT column.

You can configure the Spring Boot Gradle plugin to use this socket by setting the DOCKER_HOST environment variable to unix:///Users/<user>/.colima/docker.sock or by adding the following to your build file as shown in the documentation.

tasks.named("bootBuildImage") {
  docker {
    host = "unix:///Users/<user>/.colima/docker.sock"
  }
}