Just sharing some potential bugs, and how I worked through them. I recently got a new MacBook Pro (M4 Pro) and downloaded Dev Kinsta and Docker Desktop to pull down my sites but I kept running into the following issues:
DevKinsta repeatedly shows “disk almost full” warning on fresh installation and would not import or create any site. To fix the disk space error, I needed to increase Docker disk sizes, removing all containers, images, and volumes, and restart DevKinsta
Then, any site creation or import from Kinsta failed with the frontend error: “Something bad happened” and retrying did not work. The log was showing:
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘root’@‘localhost’ (using password: YES)
Cause
When Docker Desktop restarts (e.g., after increasing disk size), it cleared the containers but persistent Docker volumes seemed to have remained. The MariaDB container reuses the old volume data and skips password initialization, even though the MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD environment variable is set which causes a mismatch between DevKinsta’s expected password and the actual database state (no password).
If the issue persists (which it did for me after multiple attempts and restarts), manually set the database password docker exec devkinsta_db mysql -u root -e “ALTER USER ‘root’@‘localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY '*************'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;” docker exec devkinsta_db mysql -u root -p************* -e “GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON . TO ‘root’@‘%’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘*************’ WITH GRANT OPTION; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;”
Note: The password ************* is DevKinsta’s default. You can verify your instance’s password in ~/Library/Logs/DevKinsta/main.log
(look for mariadb.password).
Not sure if this is something that I did wrong in my setup, or if it needs to be fixed for others, or if it’s a bug with DevKinsta, but nevertheless I thought I’d share in case it was helpful for others.
Thanks a lot for sharing, that’s really detailed and helpful. I want to take a closer look to see what might be going on in your setup. Could you please share a few details so I can check properly?
macOS version Docker Desktop version DevKinsta version
It would also help if you could attach your DevKinsta log file so I can review what’s happening during startup.
Once I have those details, I’ll try to replicate the behavior and see if this might be a compatibility issue or something that needs to be escalated.
We really appreciate how thoroughly you documented everything! Looking forward to your response.
Thank you for sharing your detailed solution regarding the issues encountered with ERROR 1045. However, I was unable to replicate the problem during my tests.
Here are the details of my setup:
Machine: M2 Chip
OS: 15.6.1
DevKinsta: 2.13.5
Docker Desktop: versions 4.46.0 and 4.49
I increased the disk space limit in the Docker Desktop settings, as shown in the screenshot, and restarted both Docker Desktop and DevKinsta, but I was still able to create a new site and import an existing site from Kinsta without any issues. I tested this on both Docker Desktop versions: 4.46.0 and 4.49.
It seems that the issue may be isolated to your machine. However, it could potentially be a common issue that other users might experience. So thank you once again for sharing your solution.
Out of extra due diligence, I went through and deleted everything one more time (ran docker system prune, etc), but left the Docker Desktop allocations, and restarted my machine. When I go to create a site, this is the error that I get.
Did the commands below run without any errors? Note, you may need to convert them to plaintext before running them bc of the autoformatting in this thread.
docker exec devkinsta_db mysql -u root -e “ALTER USER ‘root’@‘localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY '*************'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;”
docker exec devkinsta_db mysql -u root -p************* -e “GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO ‘root’@‘%’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘*************’ WITH GRANT OPTION; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;”
Same error as above when trying to pull a side down from kinsta. Something bad happened on step 2.
I have sent the log to support so hopefully they can help, spent too many hours now going round in circles trying to find a fix. If I get a fix from them I will post it.
Perhaps you can try deleting all the DevKinsta containers, images, and volumes within Docker Desktop again, one last time for me. But this time, also delete these two folders. Then reinstall Devkinsta. Then, try adjusting the disk limit again and see if the issue persists.
