Ubuntu – Overwrite dockerd default settings

Trying to create a new bridge on docker, we got the following error

$ docker-compose up -d;
Creating network "docker-compose_new_bridge" with driver "bridge"
ERROR: could not find an available, non-overlapping IPv4 address pool among the defaults to assign to the network

After investigating, we realized that it was due to some default limitations of docker that did not allow more virtual networks to be created. To overcome the problem, we read that we had to give access to more address space using the /etc/docker/daemon.json.

On Ubuntu that file did not exist so we created it and copied the following content to it:

{
  "default-address-pools": [
    {
      "base": "172.80.0.0/16",
      "size": 24
    },
    {
      "base": "172.90.0.0/16",
      "size": 24
    }
  ]
}

Source: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/dockerd/

This configuration allowed Docker to reserve the network address space 172.80.[0-255].0/24 and 172.90.[0-255].0/24, that provided the daemon a total of 512 networks each owning 256 addresses.

To apply the changes to the daemon, we restarted it:

sudo systemctl restart docker.service;

and then we applied our changes to our docker ecosystem:

docker-compose up -d;