Setting CONTAINERD_ADDRESS somewhere for nerdctl

[huyz]

I'm installing Rancher Desktop 1.4.1 for the first time on MacBook ARM and I can't seem to get nerdctl to read the Unix socket address for the dockerd container runtime (except from the command-line flags, which isn't convenient).

Here are my steps:

brew install docker docker-compose

mkdir -p ~/.docker/cli-plugins
ln -sfn /opt/homebrew/opt/docker-compose/bin/docker-compose ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-compose

brew install rancher

During the initial setup for Rancher Desktop, I get asked whether to use containerd or dockerd. I select dockerd.

Now when I run nerdctl, I get:

FATA[0000] cannot access containerd socket "/run/k3s/containerd/containerd.sock" (hint: try running with `--address /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.sock` to connect to Docker-managed containerd): no such file or directory

If I add the --address flag it works, but it's not quite convenient.

So I try to set the envvar CONTAINERD_ADDRESS but that doesn't work (maybe it's limactl's fault for not passing it through?).

I try several ways to have address be read from nerdctl.toml:

• from ~/.config/nerdctl/nerdctl.toml
• setting export NERDCTL_TOML=~/.config/nerdctl/nerdctl.toml
• from /etc/nerdctl/nerdctl.toml

Nothing works except setting a shell alias: alias nerdctl='nerdctl --address /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.sock'

What am I doing wrong?

[jandubois]

Please use the docker cli with the dockerd runtime; the nerdctl cli is only meant for containerd.

Now dockerd is running a containerd instance internally, but you should not use it directly; you should always go through the docker socket to talk to it.