How to programatically enable 'Expose daemon on tcp://localhost:2375 without TLS' (Windows 10 v2004) on Hyper-V

Question

I am trying to automate the installation and configuration of Docker on Windows 10 (v2004) using WSL2 and Docker Desktop.

By default the Docker Desktop setting Expose daemon on tcp://localhost:2375 without TLS is not enabled.

How can this option be enabled without using the GUI i.e. is there a way to do this programatically?

Answer 1

There is a settings.json file located in the user's roaming profile e.g. C:\users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Docker that contains the following property: exposeDockerAPIOnTCP2375.

If this property is set to 'true' before starting Docker Desktop, then Expose daemon on tcp://localhost:2375 without TLS will be enabled once Docker Desktop has started.

This can be done programmatically e.g. with PowerShell

$dockerSettingPath = "C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Docker\settings.json"
$settingsContent = Get-Content $dockerSettingPath -Raw | ConvertFrom-Json
$settingsContent.exposeDockerAPIOnTCP2375 = $true
$settingsContent | ConvertTo-Json | Set-Content $dockerSettingPath