You will then need to use VirtualBox to create a default VM (“default” is the expected name for most docker-machine commands for simplicity’s sake, we will continue to refer to the VM as such). Once both are operating, you will need to set up the following Docker components:īrew install docker-machine docker docker-compose Instructions on installation can be found at Oracle VM VirtualBox and The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux) - Homebrew respectively. To begin, you will need to have both VirtualBox and HomeBrew installed and running. The following is a writeup to enable the use of docker-machine as an alternate solution to start a VM with the docker components to get access to CLI. On MacOS, Docker is run using a Linux Virtual Machine and relies on sub-components: HyperKit, VPNKit, and DataKit to support its functionalities. Docker itself “uses the Linux kernel and features of the kernel, like Cgroups and namespaces, to segregate processes so they can run independently”. According to Docker’s “What is a Container” article, “A container is a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another”. Docker is a means to run containerized applications on a host to have reliable solutions to deploy it.