Installing Docker and Compose on Mac

Docker Desktop

Docker Desktop for Mac is a packaged product from Docker, Inc. with a simple installer that gets you a single-engine installation of Docker that’s ideal for local development needs. You can also enable a single-node Kubernetes cluster.

We’ll look at a simple installation in a second, but before doing that it’s worth noting that Docker Desktop on Mac doesn’t give you the Docker Engine running natively on the Mac OS Darwin kernel. Behind the scenes, the Docker daemon is running inside a lightweight Linux VM that seamlessly exposes the daemon and API to your Mac environment. This means you can open a terminal on your Mac and use the regular Docker commands.

Although this works seamlessly on your Mac, don’t forget that it’s Docker on Linux under the hood — so it’s only going to work with Linux-based Docker containers. This is good though, as it’s where most of the container action is.