moby--moby/docs/sources/installation/mac.md

page_title: Installation on Mac OS X page_description: Instructions for installing Docker on OS X using boot2docker. page_keywords: Docker, Docker documentation, requirements, boot2docker, VirtualBox, SSH, Linux, OSX, OS X, Mac

Installing Docker on Mac OS X

Note

: Docker is still under heavy development! We don't recommend using it in production yet, but we're getting closer with each release. Please see our blog post, Getting to Docker 1.0

Note: Docker is supported on Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" or newer.

Docker has two key components: the Docker daemon and the docker binary which acts as a client. The client passes instructions to the daemon which builds, runs and manages your Docker containers. As Docker uses some Linux-specific kernel features you can't use it directly on OS X. Instead we run the Docker daemon inside a lightweight virtual machine on your local OS X host. We can then use a native client docker binary to communicate with the Docker daemon inside our virtual machine. To make this process easier we've designed a helper application called boot2docker to install that virtual machine and run our Docker daemon.

boot2docker uses VirtualBox to create the virtual machine so we'll need to install that first.

Installing VirtualBox

Docker on OS X needs VirtualBox to run. To begin with, head over to VirtualBox Download Page and get the tool for OS X hosts x86/amd64.

Once the download is complete, open the disk image, run VirtualBox.pkg and install VirtualBox.

Note

: Do not simply copy the package without running the installer.

Installing boot2docker manually

Downloading the boot2docker script

boot2docker provides a handy script to manage the VM running the Docker daemon. It also takes care of the installation of that VM.

Open up a new terminal window and run the following commands to get boot2docker:

# Enter the installation directory
$ mkdir -p ~/bin
$ cd ~/bin

# Get the file
$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/boot2docker/boot2docker/master/boot2docker > boot2docker

# Mark it executable
$ chmod +x boot2docker

Installing the Docker OS X Client

The Docker daemon is accessed using the docker binary.

Run the following commands to get it downloaded and set up:

# Get the docker binary
$ DIR=$(mktemp -d ${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/dockerdl.XXXXXXX) && \
  curl -f -o $DIR/ld.tgz https://get.docker.io/builds/Darwin/x86_64/docker-latest.tgz && \
  gunzip $DIR/ld.tgz && \
  tar xvf $DIR/ld.tar -C $DIR/ && \
  cp $DIR/usr/local/bin/docker ./docker

# Copy the executable file
$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
$ sudo cp docker /usr/local/bin/

Configure the Docker OS X Client

The Docker client, docker, uses an environment variable DOCKER_HOST to specify the location of the Docker daemon to connect to. Specify your local boot2docker virtual machine as the value of that variable.

$ export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://127.0.0.1:4243

Installing boot2docker with Homebrew

If you are using Homebrew on your machine, simply run the following command to install boot2docker:

$ brew install boot2docker

Run the following command to install the Docker client:

$ brew install docker

And that's it! Let's check out how to use it.

How To Use Docker On Mac OS X

Running the Docker daemon via boot2docker

Firstly we need to initialize our boot2docker virtual machine. Run the boot2docker command.

$ boot2docker init

This will setup our initial virtual machine.

Next we need to start the Docker daemon.

$ boot2docker up

There are a variety of others commands available using the boot2docker script. You can see these like so:

$ boot2docker
Usage ./boot2docker {init|start|up|pause|stop|restart|status|info|delete|ssh|download}

The Docker client

Once the virtual machine with the Docker daemon is up, you can use the docker binary just like any other application.

$ docker version
Client version: 0.10.0
Client API version: 1.10
Server version: 0.10.0
Server API version: 1.10
Last stable version: 0.10.0

Using Docker port forwarding with boot2docker

In order to forward network ports from Docker with boot2docker we need to manually forward the port range Docker uses inside VirtualBox. To do this we take the port range that Docker uses by default with the -P option, ports 49000-49900, and run the following command.

Note: The boot2docker virtual machine must be powered off for this to work.

for i in {49000..49900}; do
 VBoxManage modifyvm "boot2docker-vm" --natpf1 "tcp-port$i,tcp,,$i,,$i";
 VBoxManage modifyvm "boot2docker-vm" --natpf1 "udp-port$i,udp,,$i,,$i";
done

Connecting to the VM via SSH

If you feel the need to connect to the VM, you can simply run:

$ ./boot2docker ssh

# User: docker
# Pwd:  tcuser

If SSH complains about keys then run:

$ ssh-keygen -R '[localhost]:2022'

Upgrading to a newer release of boot2docker

To upgrade an initialized boot2docker virtual machine, you can use the following 3 commands. Your virtual machine's disk will not be changed, so you won't lose your images and containers:

$ boot2docker stop
$ boot2docker download
$ boot2docker start

Learn More

boot2docker

See the GitHub page for boot2docker.

Next steps

You can now continue with the Hello World example.