How to fix Error response from daemon: network bridge not found in Docker

First, verify whether the bridge network is listed:

docker network ls

Look for a network named "bridge" in the output. If it's missing, that confirms the problem.

You can also try to inspect it directly:

docker network inspect bridge

If this returns "network bridge not found", proceed with the fixes below.

The most common fix is to delete Docker's network database file and restart:

# Stop Docker
sudo systemctl stop docker

# Remove the corrupted database file
sudo rm /var/lib/docker/network/files/local-kv.db

# Start Docker again
sudo systemctl start docker

Docker will recreate the local-kv.db file and the default bridge network on startup.

Note: If you can't find the file, you may need root access:

sudo su
ls -la /var/lib/docker/network/files/

If the simple fix doesn't work, do a more thorough cleanup:

# Stop Docker first
sudo systemctl stop docker

# Remove the docker0 interface if it exists in a bad state
sudo ip link del docker0 2>/dev/null || true

# Remove all network state files
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/docker/network/*

# Recreate the necessary directory
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/docker/network/files

# Start Docker
sudo systemctl start docker

Docker will reinitialize all networking components from scratch.

The bridge might be intentionally disabled in Docker's configuration:

cat /etc/docker/daemon.json

If you see "bridge": "none", remove that line or set it properly:

{
  "bridge": "docker0"
}

Or simply remove the bridge key entirely to use defaults. Then restart Docker:

sudo systemctl restart docker

If the bridge network was deleted, you can recreate it:

docker network create bridge

However, this creates a user-defined bridge, not the default one. For the default bridge behavior, you typically need to restart Docker to have it recreate the true default bridge.

For containers that need immediate networking, you can use:

docker network create --driver bridge my-bridge
docker run --network my-bridge myimage

Clean up any orphaned resources that might be causing conflicts:

docker system prune -f

This removes stopped containers, unused networks, dangling images, and build cache. Then restart Docker:

sudo systemctl restart docker

The default bridge uses 172.17.0.0/16. Check if another interface is using this range:

ip addr show | grep 172.17

If there's a conflict, configure Docker to use a different subnet in /etc/docker/daemon.json:

{
  "bip": "192.168.1.1/24"
}

Then restart Docker:

sudo systemctl restart docker

As a last resort, especially after kernel updates:

sudo reboot

This ensures all kernel modules are properly loaded and network interfaces are cleanly initialized. After reboot, verify Docker is working:

docker network ls
docker run hello-world