I practice continuous deployment on my side project GALGA. Every time the continuous integration pipeline finishes green on master the application is deployed… if all goes well. Earlier in the week all deploys broke 😱

Deploying the application involves spinning up a new Digital Ocean droplet using docker-machine. Earlier this week every deployment started mysteriously failing with the following error:

Error creating machine: Error running provisioning: Unable to verify the Docker daemon is listening: Maximum number of retries (10) exceeded.

It turns out that the latest Docker version doesn’t work with docker-machine. To make things right again you’ll want to pin the Docker engine version like so:

--engine-install-url "https://releases.rancher.com/install-docker/19.03.9.sh"

It took a while of Googling to find the issue so I’m hoping this post can save someone else the headache.