[Bug]: DockerDesktopClientProviderStrategy is always applicable

Open Beginner friendly
#11,829 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
74/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
docker, java
Domain
testing-qa

Research direction

Inspect DockerDesktopClientProviderStrategy, focusing on socketPath, isApplicable(), and getTransportConfig(). Start by reproducing the strategy selection on macOS without Docker Desktop, then review nearby tests or the strategy test suite. Done means the strategy is not selected when its socket is unavailable and no NullPointerException occurs while configurations are attempted.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

type/bug
Module

Core

Testcontainers version

2.0.5

Using the latest Testcontainers version?

Yes

Host OS

macOS

Host Arch

ARM

Docker version
29.5.3
What happened?

DockerDesktopClientProviderStrategy is always applicable even when Docker Desktop is not installed at all. It happens because the socketPath field is annotated with @Getter(lazy = true) and so its actual type is AtomicReference, but the isApplicable() method checks nullability as this.socketPath != null.

@Getter(lazy = true)
@Nullable
private final Path socketPath = resolveSocketPath();

@Override
protected boolean isApplicable() {
    return (SystemUtils.IS_OS_LINUX || SystemUtils.IS_OS_MAC) && this.socketPath != null;
}

Finally, the getTransportConfig() method fails with NPE as getSocketPath() returns null.

@Override
public TransportConfig getTransportConfig() throws InvalidConfigurationException {
    return TransportConfig.builder().dockerHost(URI.create("unix://" + getSocketPath().toString())).build();
}
Relevant log output
[Test worker] ERROR o.t.d.DockerClientProviderStrategy - Could not find a valid Docker environment. Please check configuration. Attempted configurations were:
	UnixSocketClientProviderStrategy: failed with exception InvalidConfigurationException (Could not find unix domain socket). Root cause NoSuchFileException (/var/run/docker.sock)
	DockerDesktopClientProviderStrategy: failed with exception NullPointerException (Cannot invoke "java.nio.file.Path.toString()" because the return value of "org.testcontainers.dockerclient.DockerDesktopClientProviderStrategy.getSocketPath()" is null)
Additional Information

No response

Dominant language
Java
Stars
8.7k
Forks
1.9k
Avg merge
2d 17h
Merged PRs (30d)
9

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from testcontainers/testcontainers-java

All issues in testcontainers/testcontainers-java

Similar issues

More Java issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.