Docker is a development platform used to build, run, compile, and share applications in a containerized environment. Containerization is the process of packaging all the application dependencies and configurations together so that the same container can be run in various environments.

As a developer, we need to work on many virtual machines. I used mainly VMware and Virtual box when I was using windows. When you work on virtual machines in Mac OS X, you can use Docker to work with virtual machines. If we want to use docker on Mac, Docker desktop is the best tool to use.

Download Docker on Mac OS X

Go to the docker hub page to get the community edition of the Docker.

Click the Get Docker link from the browser or use the command to download the files from Url in the downloads folder.

Once the file is downloaded you can install Docker by double-clicking the Docker.dmg file.

Once this installation is complete, you will see an icon of Docker in Launchpad and installed location through terminal. Click on the icon from the launchpad when you want to use it.

Once you start the docker it’s menu will come up in the main title window. you can sign in using the docker user name and password or sign up for a new one if you don’t have it. You need to sign in to use many of the images the docker provides.

Let’s use the terminal to check the status of installation.

Test the Docker Installation

Run the docker --version command to check the docker version

Pull the hello-world image from Docker Hub and run a container:

List the Images

Lets List the hello-world image that was downloaded from docker using docker image ls command.

Exploring Docker helo

List the Containers

If you want to list the installed containers, use the docker container ls --all command