In order to get started, we need to obtain the Docker client app. Incidentally, that’s exactly what “Docker for Mac” is doing under the hood: it is actually a VM based on Apple’s Hypervisor framework which hosts Docker, not your Mac itself. What that means is that it’s possible to direct your docker client to talk to a Docker service over the network, and that’s what we can do as well to enable “regular” docker commands to work with a locally running “Linux Docker VM”.

You’ve probably seen the reference to unix:///var/run/docker.sock at times. Now in case you’re not aware, Docker is actually a service that exposes an API over HTTP and when you run docker commands, they control the service via these API requests on a local socket. They can expose their ports and instead of connecting to localhost:5432 on the host, you connect to your VM’s IP address, for instance 192.168.64.8:5432. This works fine and allows you run containers like for instance a Postgres database. We left off at booting an ARM Linux virtual machine, and installing & running Docker inside it. This is a follow-up post to “Running Docker on Apple Silicon M1”, continuing the journey of exploring Docker on Apple’s new M1 machines.

Ubuntu container with docker on mac