Docker on Ubuntu, getting ERROR: BuildKit is enabled but the buildx component is missing or broken. Install the buildx component

Question

I ran the command sudo rm -rf ~/.local/share/containers/ and now I'm getting,

ERROR: BuildKit is enabled but the buildx component is missing or broken.
       Install the buildx component to build images with BuildKit:
       https://docs.docker.com/go/buildx/

When I try to run docker build how can I resolve this error?

Answer 1

In my case, the solution was to remove the distro provided docker (which I didn't have -- this is just for safety),

$ for pkg in docker.io docker-doc docker-compose podman-docker containerd runc; do sudo apt-get remove $pkg; done

Which should do nothing, and didn't for me but that's fine. Then you need to reinstall docker-ce,

apt-get --reinstall install docker-ce

In my case, that didn't work either, because the distro upgrade from one version of Ubuntu to another disabled the docker-ce repo, so I had to re-add that, I just re-ran the commands Docker provides,

# Add Docker's official GPG key:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg

# Add the repository to Apt sources:
echo \
  "deb [arch="$(dpkg --print-architecture)" signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  "$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME")" stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update

Then I ran,

apt-get --reinstall install docker-ce

And it worked!