I’ve been learning Docker lately and all was working well, then today I started seeing the following error lookup index.docker.io no DNS servers error when trying to pull a docker container from Docker Hub. Very strange as this worked fine previously.

For the record, I was able to use apt-get to update packages and I could ping the index.docker.io address, so I’m not sure what changed to make this break.

Anyway to solve the problem we can simply append dns-nameservers to the file /etc/network/interfaces

For example

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.x.x.x
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.x.x.1
dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4

In the above I’ve added the loopback and two google name servers to the interfaces file.

To activate these changes (without a reboot) just use

ifdown eth0 && ifup eth0