#2978·earthly

buildkit_host in configuration file is ignored

Author: mxeyCreated May 24, 2023Updated May 13, 2025
Labelstype:bug

Apparently since v0.7.5 Earthly ignores the buildkit_host setting in its configuration file. Only the environment variable EARTHLY_BUILDKIT_HOST has an effect.

The following was done with v0.7.6 because it made the error obvious. We already had the connection issue with v0.7.5 though, so I assume only the error message changed. The output is from a Gitlab CI job.

$ earthly --version
earthly version v0.7.6 78d2f5be89c8ada1048ed7130ed319948bf79912 linux/amd64; Alpine Linux 
$ cat ${EARTHLY_CONFIG}
global:
    # 172.17.0.1 ist der Host im Docker-Standard-CIDR
    buildkit_host: "tcp://172.17.0.1:8372"
    tls_enabled: true
    tlsca: "/etc/earthly/cert.pem"
    tlscert: "/etc/earthly/cert.pem"
    tlskey: "/etc/earthly/key.pem"
git:
    gitlab.rz.babiel.com:
        auth: https
        user: gitlab-ci-token
        password: [MASKED]
$ earthly +test
loading config values from "/tmp/earthly.conf.yaml"
            frontend | No frontend initialized. Use --verbose to see details
 Init 
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
           buildkitd | Connecting to ...
Share your logs with an Earthly account (experimental)! Register for one at https://ci.earthly.dev/.
Error: build new buildkitd client: connect provided buildkit: timeout 1m0s: could not connect to buildkit: failed to list workers: Unavailable: connection error: desc = "transport: Error while dialing: dial unix /run/buildkit/buildkitd.sock: connect: no such file or directory": buildkitd did not respond (in time)

If I set EARTHLY_BUILDKIT_HOST to tcp://172.17.0.1:8372, it works. So it seems to me the configuration file setting is ignored and only the environment variable matters.