Docker Compose missing from Docker Desktop?

Docker Desktop for Windows
1

I feel like I’ve given this disclosure a thousand times over the last couple weeks as I try to get all the kinks worked out of self-hosting and whatnot, but I’m new to all this and I’m not sure where I’ve gone.

I downloaded Docker Desktop, and I have Jellyfin and Nginx running in containers. That’s all that’s there, and if you had asked me a week ago when I installed them, I would have looked you in the eye and sworn I downloaded those through docker compose. I have docker-compose files for them and I’m pretty sure I used ‘docker-compose’ as a command with the hyphen in their installation. But.

When I try to install something new through compose or type in ‘docker compose version,’ it says that ‘compose’ isn’t a command. Whether or not I include the hyphen doesn’t seem to make a difference. Someone advised me that it sounded like I didn’t have compose installed, but I don’t understand how that’s possible when it installs with Docker Desktop?

Something that maybe could be the problem is that my Docker Desktop says that there’s a new version available to install. I can download it, and it shuts down my app, but then it never restarts itself again. When I open the app manually, Docker Desktop still has the update available like I didn’t do anything at all with it.

So this may be two separate questions, or maybe compose isn’t working because of the lack of update? But if not, what am I doing wrong? How is compose gone? Why won’t my docker restart? Any ideas?

2

You probably have a broken installation so the docker cli plugins are not available from the command line even if everything is on the filesystem. If the installation is already broken, that can cause the update to fail as well.

Run

docker info

You will see the “Plugins” section at the beginning. Look for docker-compose.exe and try to run it directly. For exmple from a poweer shell:

C:\"Program Files"\Docker\cli-plugins\docker-compose.exe version

If it works, then compose is installed, but it should also be here:

C:\"Program Files"\Docker\Docker\resources\bin\docker-compose.exe version

That should be in the PATH environment variable too. I mean the parent folder. You can check it from powershell too

$env:path

If it is missing, you probably have to add back. If it doesn’t help, the problem could be more serious and you might need to uninstall Docker Desktop completely and install it again. I don’t know what could have gone wrong. It never happened to me, but I’m a macOS and Linux guy, so I don’t user Windows frequently.

3

So I do think it’s missing, the plugins section is empty.

Oh my god, I found out how to download it separately through windows and did a lot of trial and error and it WORKS. You’re my favorite, my guy. Thank you so much!!