Docker For Mac Socket

As a developer, I'm generally pretty happy with my Mac as a development machine. As I spend more time with Docker though, I certainly wish that I could run my containers natively on the Mac. Unfortunately, OSX is not Linux and it simply doesn't have the kernel features that are required to run Docker containers.

When working with Docker (engine) on remote machines and Docker Compose on local machines it is very useful to setup Unix Domain Socket Forwarding because you no longer need to transfer Compose Files to the remote machine. Rather now you can execute the client program docker-compose in your.

As a result, we Mac users typically find ourselves running a Linux distro in a VM in order to get our Docker fix. The tool makes this about as easy as it can be by provisioning a virtual machine running the Docker daemon and installing a Mac version of the Docker client which will communicate with that daemon. The end result is that it (almost) feels like we're running Docker containers natively on the Mac -- the client tool runs in the local terminal and transparently interacts with the Docker server running inside the VM. For most people boot2docker is the perfect tool for working with Docker on the Mac (or for that matter).

There are, however, a few scenarios where boot2docker doesn't work. Here at CenturyLink Labs we've spent a lot of time recently developing against some of the features unique to. So I'm running CoreOS instead of boot2docker's Tiny Core Linux as my Docker host. Similarly, you may already have an existing Ubuntu VM with Docker that you'd like to use. In these cases, you're typically stuck having to log into your VM and executing your Docker commands there. So what do you do when you want that native-ish experience on your Mac but you're running a Docker host that doesn't work with boot2docker? Let's have a look.

Docker API The key to making this work is recognizing that the Docker client does all of its interaction with the Docker daemon through a RESTful API. Any time you use docker build or docker run the Docker client is simply issuing HTTP requests to the on your behalf. Oracle linux virtualbox for mac install.

So the trick to getting a Docker client running on your Mac to interact with a Docker host in a virtual machine is to make sure that the API is accessible and the client knows how to find it. This is work that boot2docker will do automatically but I'll explain how to set it up manually in the sections below. TCP Port Binding In most installations the Docker API is configured by default to listen on unix:///var/run/docker.sock which only allows local connections by the root user. The first step is to bind the Docker daemon to a TCP port so that the client (running outside the VM) can interact with it. Note: This is most definitely NOT something that you want to do in a production environment as it effectively gives full Docker daemon access to anyone who can reach that port.