Is Docker running within WSL or connecting back to Windows?

Question

After successfully installing Docker in WSL, if I run standard Docker commands, I get connection errors. Runing with sudo or not yields the same result in all examples.

Answer 1

The Docker daemon can't run under WSL as it doesn't implement the necessary kernel ABI's. If you're running Docker for Windows, you are probably connecting to the Hyper-V virtual machine that it manages.

Because it's on a different machine, you will not be able to mount WSL directories as Docker volumes, but you can build images from a WSL directory. This is because on a build, the client creates a tarball and sends it to the daemon.