Running Docker on Mac

Tonight's mission - get an application from the day job up and running on one of my Macs at home...

So, Docker is designed to run on top of a Linux kernel - which Mac OS X obviously doesn't offer.

A quick Google leads to:
http://docs.docker.com/installation/mac/

which directs me to Boot2Docker :
https://github.com/boot2docker/osx-installer/releases

Open the downloaded package and double click to install the VM image

Binaries are now on the path and ready to run from a command line terminal:

> boot2docker init
> boot2docker start

Then the top secret bit for pulling down the Dockerised application...

Tweak the configuration properties to use the newly created Docker host instead of the hand-coded Linux environment's Docker configuration (host IP address).

Run the application's tests.

Let out a satisfied "Aaah" or "Mmm" (optional).

This all took about 20 minutes, but most of the time was spent waiting on downloads.

Mac for Java development

I've been stuck in the world of Windows as my desktop development environment for my entire professional career thus far (11+ years).

In the last couple of companies that I have worked at several of the developers have been successfully using a Mac for their day to day development.

It seems to be the case that "Once you go Mac, you never go back".

There are a couple of Macbook Pro laptops sitting around unused at my current work, so I'm wondering whether I should make the move.

Given that I seem to be spending quite a bit of time configuring *nix servers, it would make sense for me to have a unix-based operating system.