Question

Troubleshooting unauthorized for Droplet setup

Posted on March 22, 2021
Docker DigitalOcean Droplets
Asked by techjazzguy

I have been trying to resolve the following issue. Maybe someone could point me to additional documentation or some other setup step.

I have a droplet created with some basic setup. Docker is installed. The DigitalOcean command line tools are installed. I went through the following setup which includes commands for doctl auth list, auth init, and auth switch so that I can see and use/verify my registry: https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/container-registry/quickstart/#push-to-your-registry. I have an API key that appears to be set up. However, after doing all that, I am stuck when trying to do a docker run command: docker run -p 8089:8089 [private repo URL] The error that comes up is: “Error response from daemon: Get [private repo URL]: unauthorized: authentication required.”

The private repo URL is valid. Using the root user. Should I use a different user? I did look for documentation on user setup but could not find it. Sorry, if I missed it.

One thing to note is that I am not using Kubernetes integration yet. I am trying verify a basic docker run before I expand this setup with Kubernetes integration.

I was able to run the above docker command locally so I am trying to replicate this on the droplet. What am I missing?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

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Janusz Szeligowski • March 24, 2021

Accepted Answer

Hi,

I encountered the same problem being logged in to sudoer account and messed things up running doctl and docker with different privileges (user/root). I ran doctl as a regular user, and docker as a root. It was like that:

doctl registry login

OutputLogging Docker in to registry.digitalocean.com

sudo docker run registry.digitalocean.com/yannek-repo/testimage:1.0

OutputUnable to find image 'registry.digitalocean.com/yannek-repo/testimage:1.0' locally
docker: Error response from daemon: Get https://registry.digitalocean.com/v2/yannek-repo/testimage/manifests/1.0: unauthorized: authentication required.
See 'docker run --help'.

Everything started running fine when I set up doctl authentication with sudo command, and used it consequently since then.

I hope it gives you some clue.

Rumyana Rumenova • February 5, 2024

An alternative to running doctl as sudo would be to use docker login directly. DO uses your token as username and password. So:

cat path-to-token.tok | sudo docker login registry.digitalocean.com/<your-registry-name> --username $(cat path-to-token.tok) --password-stdin

Not sure if doctl provides any additional security really. Your token is saved in ~/.config/doctl/config.yaml anyway as a result of running doctl auth. Docker still saves a different authentication token in /root/.docker/config.json, same as what doctl would cause it to do.

Running docker without sudo is not a good idea so it’s surprising that this question/answer are so hard to find. Would be nice if this problem was noted in tutorials/documentation.