Docker on a Mac - Getting Started with Cloud Development

If you want to learn about Cloud services or Cloud deployments especially on a Mac, the first step is to install Docker on a Mac.

There are two options to install…

Download Docker Desktop For Mac (replaces the old Docker for Mac package a lot of sites refer to) from the official Docker Hub at https://hub.docker.com/editions/community/docker-ce-desktop-mac and follow the instructions to install
Use Homebrew (brew) our favorite Mac Installer using the command

brew install --cask docker

If docker is installed correctly you should see the Docker application icon in your Launchpad. Now launch the Docker app from the Launchpad and you’ll be asked for permissions to ‘open’ the app and then provide privileged access to Docker Desktop

Once you give permissions, the Docker UI and Docker Engine will now be installed, along with the symlinks necessary to run docker from the CLI (terminal) and you show see the following message eventually

You can now go back to the terminal and run the command

docker --version

To determine the Docker version you are running (Docker version 20.10.7 as of June 2021) and you can run the command displayed in the window above to start a new docker container and you can follow the getting-started guide in the Docker docs