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Docker and Podman environments on Windows and Mac machines

For Young and Old

Article from ADMIN 66/2021

By Thorsten Scherf

Develop container applications on a Windows or Mac system with Docker Desktop or Podman.

If you are running a Linux system, you will not have much trouble using either Docker or Podman as a container manager. The software is available from the repositories of almost all the well-known Linux distributions. However, the situation is different if you want to set up an environment for developing container applications on a Windows or Mac system. For this, you have to resort to external software. Docker Desktop [1] provides a Docker environment for these systems, with other components in addition to the Docker engine and the command-line client. For example, you also get the container orchestration tool Kubernetes [2] delivered free with the software.

Older Systems Locked Out

An older Windows or Mac machine, however, can be problematic. Docker Desktop requires at least Windows 10 or macOS 10.14, although you can still resort to Docker Machine [3] in this case, which creates a virtual Linux system on the local host that you can then use to access the Docker engine. The example in Figure 1 uses VirtualBox [4] on a Mac for the virtual machine setup. You can either download VirtualBox as an installation archive directly from the website, or if you want to install it on a Mac system, you can install it with the Homebrew package manager [5].

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