Configuring verbose output from the Docker daemon in Amazon ECS - Amazon Elastic Container Service
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Configuring verbose output from the Docker daemon in Amazon ECS

If you're having trouble with Docker containers or images, you can turn on debug mode on your Docker daemon. Using debugging provides more verbose output from the daemon, You can use this to retrive error messages that are sent from container registries, such as Amazon ECR.

Important

This procedure is written for the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Linux AMI. For other operating systems, see Enable debugging and Control and configure Docker with systemd in the Docker documentation.

To use Docker daemon debug mode on the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Linux AMI

  1. Connect to your container instance.

  2. Open the Docker options file with a text editor, such as vi. For the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Linux AMI, the Docker options file is at /etc/sysconfig/docker.

  3. Find the Docker options statement and add the -D option to the string, inside the quotes.

    Note

    If the Docker options statement begins with a #, remove that character to uncomment the statement and enable the options.

    For the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Linux AMI, the Docker options statement is called OPTIONS. For example:

    # Additional startup options for the Docker daemon, for example:
# OPTIONS="--ip-forward=true --iptables=true"
# By default we limit the number of open files per container
OPTIONS="-D --default-ulimit nofile=1024:4096"

  4. Save the file and exit your text editor.

  5. Restart the Docker daemon.

    sudo service docker restart

    The output is as follows:

    Stopping docker:                                          [  OK  ]
Starting docker:	.                                  [  OK  ]

  6. Restart the Amazon ECS agent.

    sudo service ecs restart

Your Docker logs should now show more verbose output.

time="2015-12-30T21:48:21.907640838Z" level=debug msg="Unexpected response from server: \"{\\\"errors\\\":[{\\\"code\\\":\\\"DENIED\\\",\\\"message\\\":\\\"User: arn:aws:sts::1111:assumed-role/ecrReadOnly/i-abcdefg is not authorized to perform: ecr:InitiateLayerUpload on resource: arn:aws:ecr:us-east-1:1111:repository/nginx_test\\\"}]}\\n\" http.Header{\"Connection\":[]string{\"keep-alive\"}, \"Content-Type\":[]string{\"application/json; charset=utf-8\"}, \"Date\":[]string{\"Wed, 30 Dec 2015 21:48:21 GMT\"}, \"Docker-Distribution-Api-Version\":[]string{\"registry/2.0\"}, \"Content-Length\":[]string{\"235\"}}"