Orbstack Docker Daemon not being used when building/running docker containers on MacOS

Question

I installed Orbstack to replace Docker Desktop on MacOS. Shutting Docker Desktop off and running Orbstack, I am trying to build and run docker containers but am getting the following message:

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///Users/[user-name]/.docker/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?

I see that the Orbstack Docker daemon directory is /Users/acarella/.orbstack/run/docker.sock, and there is this symlink in /var/run/: docker.sock -> /Users/[user-name]/.orbstack/run/docker.sock, but this doesn't seem to be used.

Seems like I have to get the Docker daemon to use /Users/[user-name]/.orbstack/run/ instead of /Users/[user-name]/.docker/run/ but can't figure out how to do that. Orbstack's documentation seems to suggest that replacing Docker Desktop with Orbstack should do a lot of this automatically but this seems to be something that was missed on my computer. How can I resolve this so I can use Orbstack's Docker daemon for my containers?

Answer 1

The symlink needs to point from the socket Orbstack Docker Daemon is trying to link to (/Users/[user-name]/.docker/run/docker.sock), to the actual socket location (/Users/[user-name]/.orbstack/run/docker.sock)

For example:

sudo ln -s /Users/[user-name]/.orbstack/run/docker.sock /Users/[user-name]/.docker/run/docker.sock

Then restart the Orbstack Docker daemon and see if this helped.