I hit so many times this issue that I’m nearly sure you too! Bookmark this page because in this article we are going to fix the issue with Docker: Got permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket at unix:///var/run/docker.sock:

I have a freshly installed docker in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and straight after the installation I run

$ sudo snap install docker
docker 20.10.14 from Canonical✓ installed
brewedbrilliance@my-local-k3s:~$ docker ps
Got permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket at unix:///var/run/docker.sock: Get "http://%2Fvar%2Frun%2Fdocker.sock/v1.24/containers/json": dial unix /var/run/docker.sock: connect: permission denied

So to fix got permission denied you just need to run these 2 commands

$ sudo groupadd docker
$ sudo usermod -aG docker ${USER}

Reboot your machine (newgrp will not work with ubuntu 20) and login again

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE     COMMAND   CREATED   STATUS    PORTS     NAMES

Job done!

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