Traefik Fails During Provisioning — “Docker client version 1.24 is too old (minimum supported 1.44)”

[bstwagir]

Hello OpenCRVS team,

We’ve been unable to provision and deploy our QA instance of OpenCRVS for the past two days due to a recurring Traefik failure. During provisioning, the Traefik service throws this error:

level=error msg="Failed to retrieve information of the Docker client and server host: 
Error response from daemon: client version 1.24 is too old. 
Minimum supported API version is 1.44, please upgrade your client to a newer version" providerName=docker

This prevents the application from being accessible at the configured domain, as Traefik fails to initialize properly.

We’ve tried:

• Upgrading Traefik to newer releases (v3.x), which breaks deployment since the swarmMode option was removed.
• Downgrading or pinning Traefik to v2.10/v2.11, which restores compatibility with Docker Swarm but triggers the Docker API version error above.
• Explicitly setting DOCKER_API_VERSION=1.44 in the service environment, without success.

It seems like a version mismatch between the Traefik image used during provisioning and the Docker client/server API expected by the deployment environment.

Has anyone encountered or resolved a similar issue recently?
Any guidance or workaround (especially for maintaining Swarm compatibility with newer Traefik releases) would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance

[bstwagir]

We were able to resolve this issue, so I’m sharing the solution here in case it helps anyone else running OpenCRVS with Docker Swarm + Traefik.

The root cause turned out to be a version mismatch between the Docker Engine and the Traefik image used during the provisioning process.
The Traefik version bundled with the OpenCRVS deployment scripts still relies on Docker API version 1.24, while newer Docker releases (25.x, 26.x, 27.x, etc.) no longer support API versions that old — they require a minimum API version of 1.44.

✅ Solution

The fix was to downgrade Docker Engine to a version that still supports older API levels, while keeping compatibility with Docker Swarm.
Version 24.0.9 is the most stable option we found:

docker-ce=5:24.0.9-1~ubuntu.22.04~jammy
docker-ce-cli=5:24.0.9-1~ubuntu.22.04~jammy

Traefik initialized correctly, Swarm started without errors, and the OpenCRVS provisioning completed successfully.
Hope this helps anyone who runs into the same issue.

[euanmillar]

@bstwagir apologies for the late reply. We are including a hotfix in 1.9.1

[bstwagir]

Thank you

[euanmillar]

@bstwagir rather than downgrading the docker engine, we have found that setting this version of Traefik works beter: opencrvs/opencrvs-countryconfig#1148

[bstwagir]

Understood.