Docker commands hanging with no response

https://forums.docker.com/t/what-to-do-when-all-docker-commands-hang/28103/4 By korayhk:

You don’t need to reinstall or delete the container image data. Simply do below :

Stop the service first

sudo service docker stop

Clean up some of the files as mentioned in above post from Sam.

sudo rm -rf /var/run/docker
sudo rm /var/run/docker.*"

Start service now

sudo service docker start

Start your docker image

docker start <container-name>

You will receive an error when you run the docker run at first try:

Error response from daemon: invalid header field value "oci runtime error: container with id exists: 7a244b8f5d07081538042ff64aebfe11fac1a36731526e77be53db7d94dca44d\n" Error: failed to start containers:

Try running docker start command again. You will have your container up and running magically without any errors.

After updating my ubuntu to 5.8.0-34-generic. I had similar issue. after various attempts to resolve it, My final solution was to downgrade docker to the previous working version. Steps as below:

1. Kill docker

root@LT01:~# killall dockerd
root@LT01:~# ps -aux | grep dockerd
root@LT01:~# kill -9 your docker pid

2. Remove docker ce, cli and container.io

root@LT01:/home/xyz# apt remove docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

2. optional step: my dockerd was constantly restarting so I had to disable ir. If you do the same. you'll need to enable it after new installation:

systemctl disable docker

3. check previous versions:

root@LT01:/home/xyz# apt-cache madison docker-ce

4. install older version from the above list, in my case, docker-ce 5:19.03.13~3-0~ubuntu-focal:

root@LT01:/home/xyz# apt install docker-ce=5:19.03.13~3-0~ubuntu-focal

5. optional: if you need downgrade containerd.io and cli as well then:

apt install docker-ce=5:19.03.13~3-0~ubuntu-focal containerd.io=1.3.9-1 docker-ce-cli=5:19.03.13~3-0~ubuntu-focal

6. check your installation:

whereis docker

systemctl status docker

Also, marked my docker to not upgrade on apt upgrade command.

I tried both of the answers by Garreth and steamfood, but didn't want to reinstall docker as Invincible suggested. I hadn't changed anything on my system so figured the problem had to be with my configuration/container setup rather than an installation problem with docker itself.

When running systemctl start docker or anything else to start or stop the docker service, I was getting this in my logs (running systemctl status docker in another terminal):

Loading containers: start.

Container ef06fbb157169332c453f503bb2543ce914daf54600f8fa44699fa5833d9eb90 failed to exit

It would hang after this point.

To fix this, I first killed the process identified in systemctl status docker with sudo kill -9 $PID.

I then deleted everything in /var/lib/docker/containers with sudo rm -rf /var/lib/docker/containers/*.

This cleared out the problematic container and everything worked from then on.

I know this question is a bit old, but to fix this, try deleting the contents of:

/var/run/docker/libcontainerd