Hey, seems I’m bad at blogging but good at getting (and solving) weird Docker error message, so here goes: You’re happily developing with docker, but suddenly your docker-compose build commands start giving you errors: ERROR: Couldn't connect to Docker daemon - you might need to run `docker-machine start default` You know docker is there, you’re using it right now! docker ps works fine, so what gives? Well, it appears you also get this message when you don’t have the permission to read some files in your docker build context! Just run docker build . and you’ll get a clearer error message (hopefully).