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

For most people boot2docker is the perfect tool for working with Docker on the Mac (or Windows for that matter). 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. The boot2docker tool makes this about as easy as it can be by provisioning a Tiny Core Linux virtual machine running the Docker daemon and installing a Mac version of the Docker client which will communicate with that daemon. Unfortunately, OSX is not Linux and it simply doesn't have the kernel features that are required to run Docker containers.Īs a result, we Mac users typically find ourselves running a Linux distro in a VM in order to get our Docker fix. As I spend more time with Docker though, I certainly wish that I could run my containers natively on the Mac. As a developer, I'm generally pretty happy with my Mac as a development machine.

Run docker on mac like server