Why doesn't the Docker client use Windows' credentials helper? #2358

Hello,

If I'm using Docker Desktop on Windows with a credentialsHelper configured in my %APPDATA%/Docker/settings.json, e.g.:

{
  ...
  "credentialHelper": "docker-credential-ecr-login.exe",
  ...
}

I can pull an image as follows:

docker image pull my.registry.com/my/repository:tag

And Docker will use the configured credentials helper to get the right credentials (e.g. from ~/.aws for the ECR helper above).

But if I use the docker-java, e.g.

try (var cmd = dockerClient.pullImageCmd(imageName)) {
    return cmd.start();
}

it fails as it doesn't have any credentials.

I noticed testcontainers does it manually by executing the credentials provider, but that's a lot of work, doesn't support the settings.json in Docker Desktop, and I'd have expected it to work out of the box.

Is there a way of configuring the Docker client to do this itself, and if not, why not? I would have expected this to be done by the Docker daemon in the background.