Now let’s take a look at an error our customer came across and also let’s see the solution our Support Engineers provide. This might sound like a good idea but it may have side effects.Ĭommon error setting DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive in docker As a result, it stops the errors from displaying.

This prevents the installer from opening dialog boxes during the installation process. In some cases, few people try to change this environment variable inside the Dockerfile using: ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive Generally, we can safely ignore these errors. However, these errors don’t stop the building of the image instead it informs you that the installation process tried to open a dialog box, but couldn’t. Generally, while building Docker images on Debian and Ubuntu you may have seen errors like: unable to initialize frontend: Dialog Now let’s discuss why our Support Engineers suggest not to set DEBIAN_FRONTEND to noninteractive. Why is DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive discouraged in Docker files? Today we’ll discuss why we discourage changing the default value of DEBIAN_FRONTEND. Here at Bobcares, we have seen several such Docker-related queries as part of our Docker Hosting Support for Docker users, web hosts, and online service providers. Setting DEBIAN_FRONTEND to noninteractive is mainly a ‘cosmetic’ change, we highly discourage changing it. Because it is inherited by all images and containers built from the image, effectively changing their behavior. However, setting this environment variable to noninteractive has an adverse effect.

Noninteractive mode is useful when we need zero interaction while installing or upgrading the system via apt. Are you willing to set DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive in docker so that no question/dialog is asked during apt-get install? Have a look at this blog to know why we discourage it.

Dockerfile from debian