Error unable to connect to system d bus

bash-4.2# systemctl list-units
Failed to get D-Bus connection: No connection to service manager.

How did you start the container exactly?
It looks like you started an «application container», as opposed to a «machine container».
An «application container» just runs a specific process (or group of processes); essentially it just runs what you need.
A «machine container» will run a full init, possibly with ssh, syslog, etc.
If you start an application container, it doesn’t have a real init process, and since systemctl talks to the init process… you get the idea

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The idea is to «docker run -t -i /sbin/init».

However:

• when running Ubuntu images, a number of shortcomings in Upstart will get in the way; efforts to work around them are documented on Ubuntu/Upstart issues as a container/full machine #2276
• I don’t know if peple have tried to run Fedora machine containers

This is an area which we want to support, but not so many people are working on it right now; so if you want to investigate and report your findings, that will be very helpful.

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Closing in favor of #2276.

@daviddavis Please feel free to reopen the issue if/when needed.

This error also happens here when attempting to start sshd with systemctl start sshd on an Arch Linux container. Running /sbin/init first only hangs.

Edit: This is my very first Dockerfile and I’m new to Docker, so it is fully possible that there is a command I should or should not have run: http://ix.io/d2l

@xyproto the RUN statements only happen in the building container — not the image that results — you need to have them in ENTRYPOINT or CMD. BTW what arch image did you use with this?

Thank you, michaelneale. I’ll try using CMD instead. (Seems like other tutorials for setting up ssh on distros that use systemd often involve running sshd directly, btw).

@xyproto yes I am trying with arch myself (michaelneale/archbase)- that I bootstrapped. With systemd you need to have it setup to launch the services so you get in — and the one process docker bootstraps is init (and blocks) — to get in the container you will need ssh (or perhaps nsenter could work).

I met the same problem when running systemctl in centos docker.
Official centos7 image has no systemctl, so i download and build it, everything seems ok.

here is the error result:

[root@85287f97016e systemd-216]# systemctl —version
systemd 216
-PAM -AUDIT -SELINUX +IMA -APPARMOR +SMACK +SYSVINIT -LIBCRYPTSETUP -GCRYPT -GNUTLS -ACL +XZ -LZ4 -SECCOMP -BLKID -ELFUTILS -KMOD -IDN
[root@85287f97016e systemd-216]# systemctl
Failed to get D-Bus connection: Unknown error -1
[root@85287f97016e systemd-216]# systemctl list-units
Failed to get D-Bus connection: Unknown error -1

here is the kernel version.
[root@85287f97016e systemd-216]# uname -a
Linux 85287f97016e 3.10.0-123.13.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu Dec 18 14:09:13 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

So the systemctl can not run inside docker, right? thanks!

It should. Check if systemd is running in your container?

I m also getting the same issue. Systemctl does not work and failed with D-Bus connection. Operation not permitted

Same issue.

$ docker run debian:jessie bash
root@c724e59bf246:/# systemctl list-units
Failed to get D-Bus connection: Unknown error -1

$ docker version
Client:
 Version:      1.10.3
 API version:  1.22
 Go version:   go1.5.3
 Git commit:   20f81dd
 Built:        Thu Mar 10 15:59:07 2016
 OS/Arch:      linux/amd64

Server:
 Version:      1.10.3
 API version:  1.22
 Go version:   go1.5.3
 Git commit:   20f81dd
 Built:        Thu Mar 10 15:59:07 2016
 OS/Arch:      linux/amd64

try running container with —privileged=true

docker run -d --privileged-true --name=contname image-name 

@maxivak No, you should not use «—privileged=true» here. The container does not need access to the host’s systemd.

systemd needs SYS_ADMIN, and if seccomp filtering is available, this needs to be disabled, or overridden with a custom profile. Try;

docker run -it 
  --security-opt seccomp=unconfined 
  --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN 
  -e "container=docker" 
  -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup 
  centos:7 /usr/sbin/init

edit: current versions of docker should not longer need to have seccomp disabled, so the example below should work;

docker run -it 
  --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN 
  -e "container=docker" 
  -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup 
  centos:7 /usr/sbin/init

What is the final working solution to this issue? None of the above suggestions worked for me.

I am trying to get ssh localhost to work and so I need to start the sshd service.
When I run service sshd start I get the Failed to get D-Bus connection error.
I tried it with --privileged and also @thaJeztah’s suggestion above, but I am still getting the error.

I am using oracle linux 7.2 as the base image and I am trying to setup a hadoop cluster with multiple docker containers. And so I am trying to do ssh localhost from with in the container which needs sshd running. To start sshd I am doing service sshd start and that is giving me this error. That is all I did.

When I try /sbin/init with docker run it will show me a login screen asking for username and password. Is it possible to bypass this by providing arguments directly while running the command?

@durgaswaroop Try with docker exec command to bypass the username and password prompt:

eg:
#Run a container
docker run -it -e "container=docker" --privileged=true -d --security-opt seccomp:unconfined --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup:ro local_redis bash -c "/usr/sbin/init"

#Exec bash to get shell
docker exec -it [ContainerID] /bin/bash

Please checkout for more info: https://github.com/kheshav/dockerSystemctl

@kheshav , That’s what I am doing right now. I just want to know if there is a way to login directly while using sbin/init when the -d option is not given.

Hello All,
I am new in Linux and Docker and facing the same systemctl issue .
I had ran below command to run the container :
docker run —privileged -dit -e container=docker -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup —name dhcp1 —hostname dhcp1 dhcp1 /usr/sbin/init
and after creating of container whenever i try to attach it , its get hung.

Please help me .

Hey Salman,

how are you trying to attach to it ? the init seems to be a daemon like
process so it hangs in deed…

Mário.

2017-05-26 10:09 GMT-03:00 Salman4462 <notifications@github.com>:

…

Below is the command ,

docker attach dhcp1

Thanks desavera 😊 It work for me ..

I want to configure dhcp server on container … but I don’t know the exact steps .. can you help me here ..

Hi, same problem here, I am running Docker Version 17.09.0-ce-mac35 (19611) and I am doing this:

docker run -it chemdocker/ambertools-17.3 bash
git clone https://github.com/alanwilter/acpype.git
apt-get install rabbitmq-server
systemctl enable rabbitmq-server
systemctl start rabbitmq-server
>  Failed to get D-Bus connection: Unknown error -1

Sure I read all the steps above but didn’t manage to get that to work. In the end, this is just the very first step of a container that is supposed to run a web service based on Django 2.0.

I hope anyone can help me here… or go back to VirtualBox.

TIA

@alanwilter containers are not VM’s; generally a container should have a single responsibility (and have a single main process). Think of containers as a mechanism to sandbox a process; each process gets its own sandbox («container»), and you combine those sandboxes to build up your application.

The instructions you’re trying to follow assume that rabbitmq is installed on a full machine / VM where multiple processes are in the same sandbox («the host»), in which case you need an init system to handle those processes.

If you install in a container, and don’t install multiple things in that container, there’s no need to have an init-system (in some exceptional cases you may need a minimal init to «reap» stray child processes; this can be handled by docker through the --init option on docker run or by configuring it on the daemon).

For rabbitmq; you may want to consider using the official rabbitmq image from Docker Hub, which is configured according to best practices for running in a container. If you want to build your own image, you can still use it as a reference/example; https://github.com/docker-library/rabbitmq/blob/f57f88450660d1daaf195e30d05d746279faab40/3.7/debian/Dockerfile

If you do have to install multiple things in a container (think twice, as you’d be doing away with a lot of the advantages and security that containers provide), and if you want to use systemd as an init system (in many cases a more lightweight init may be sufficient, because systemd does a lot), systemd must be the container’s main process («PID1»), not bash

@thaJeztah Many thanks for your wise words. I am just testing things for the moment and I am learning a good deal of Docker. If I will use Docker, I don’t know yet. I essentially want to put a web service that will need Django 2.0, Celery, rabbitmq (to talk with Celery).

I like the idea of Docker so I can test several things like it was «a linux box», where, in the end, the service will run, and since I am on a Mac, I definitely need to test things as if I were in a e.g. ubuntu box.

I do have VirtualBox and like it a lot, but it takes longer to do things there rather than with Docker, which is, BTW, showing me a great new possibilities. I will the link you sent and so far I am managing some interesting things with link from @dmfay.

Thanks!

@alanwilter look into using Docker Compose long term. If you’re just trying to get something off the ground, you can do it with that image, but like @thaJeztah said, containers aren’t meant to be used in quite the same way that a plain VM is. Each container should do one thing, and you build your system by pulling those together with an orchestration framework like Compose or Kubernetes.

Same problem, and after hours of troubles (all docker run options suggested above didn’t work :/), the simple solution was to replace in my dockerfile:

by:

CMD /sbin/apachectl -D FOREGROUND

Instead of running the underyling apachectl commands directly, one could also use a tool to read the *.service where that line is present anyway. That’s what the initial implementation of my systemctl.py script did.

Later it was expanded to even cover the case for running as an /sbin/init replacement. So there is no need for --priviledge mode or cgroups mapping, all the systemctl commands work without access to a systemd daemon. Have a look at the docker-systemctl-replacement for more details.

Hi everyone I`m a problem from container did you anyone solve this problem.

docker run -itd --name gomokutest62 --privileged=true -p 80:80 -p 2000:22 -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup -v /home/contestants/:/var/www/html/gomoku/gomoku_web -v /home/teacher/turninman/TurninMap/:/var/www/html/gomoku/gomoku_web/TurninMap cbb107039/server:gomoku_t6 /usr/sbin/init

run after in container

[root@gomoku ~]# docker exec -it gomokutest62 bash
[root@c0d137947bca /]# systemctl
Failed to get D-Bus connection: 此項操作並不被允許
[root@c0d137947bca /]#

if this area can’t post this problem I’m sorry , but on the internet I’m can’t find the solve way.

I met the same problem when running systemctl in centos docker.
Official centos7 image has no systemctl, so i download and build it, everything seems ok.

[root@85287f97016e systemd-216]# systemctl
Failed to get D-Bus connection: Unknown error -1
So the systemctl can not run inside docker, right? thanks!

try to run your container as privileged
privileged: true in compose file