🐳 Debugging Docker Engine Connection Issues on MacOS

So I was working on adding an insecure local registry to push images to and I managed to bomb my local docker installation.

The Docker desktop app wouldn't pull up at all and I couldn't find any logs or even find docker running with something like

ps aux | grep docker

And I kept getting this error;

$ docker ps

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?

So after enough googling, I found the place the logs were stored was around ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/log/, it was this log specifically that lead me to the right place:

cat ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/log/vm/docker.log

This showed:

...
2021-12-12T16:45:46Z docker time="2021-12-12T16:45:46Z" level=error msg="(5c94f517) 0ff224fd-DockerdPKG C<-S a2f49a7f-VMAPI GET /engine/daemon.json (9.946583ms): while parsing JSON from /Users/justin/.docker/daemon.json: invalid character '\"' after object key:value pair"
...

Ah! I made a typo when updated my daemon.json to allow an insecure repository! After patching that up, I needed a way to restart docker:

killall Docker && open /Applications/Docker.app

After that, it was all ready to go! Hopefully it helps you track down any issues for you!