Docker: How to fix "Job for docker.service failed because the control process exited with error code"

I really dont know what was happening, but I run sudo dockerd --debug like Zeitounator orients me, reboot my pc and docker works perfectly.

I had the same problem, but I folow the advise of @Zeitounator, and I run this command sudo dockerd --debug to see the problem. It display this message :

Your Linux kernel version 2.6.32-042stab138.1 is not supported for running docker. Please upgrade your kernel to 3.10.0 or newer.

I've update my kernel and it works perfectly. I hope that help you !

I had a similar issue when setting up Kubernetes on my local machine:

The error came up when I tried setting up Docker to use the OverlayFS storage driver.

I ran the following commands:

sudo systemctl stop docker
cp -au /var/lib/docker /var/lib/docker.bk

And then when I tried to start docker again using the command below:

sudo systemctl start docker

It was throwing the error:

Job for docker.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status docker.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

Here's how I solved it:

I ran the command below to inspect the issue following Tâmer Pinheiro answer:

sudo dockerd --debug

And it gave me this information:

INFO[2020-09-02T11:46:15.272833297Z] Starting up                                  
DEBU[2020-09-02T11:46:15.273547501Z] Listener created for HTTP on unix (/var/run/docker.sock) 
failed to start daemon: Unable to get the TempDir under /var/lib/docker: mkdir
/var/lib/docker/tmp: no space left on device

I also checked the disk space of the server:

df -h

which showed that there was no space left on the drive (/dev/sda1 filesystem):

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev
tmpfs           396M   12M  384M   4% /run
/dev/sda1       9.8G  9.8G     0 100% /
tmpfs           2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock

tmpfs           2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           396M     0  396M   0% /run/user/1000

And I realized that the issue had to do with no space left on device.

I had to run the following commands to clear some space for the filesystem:

sudo find /var/log -type f -delete
sudo rm -rf /var/cache/apt/*
sudo apt clean all

And then finally, I removed the /var/lib/docker.bk file, because it was too large for the 9.8GB filesystem of the server:

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/docker.bk

This time when I ran the command:

sudo systemctl restart docker

everything worked fine.

That's all.

I hope this helps