Taking Apple Container for a spin

I just heard about the new project from Apple, Container. It’s a tool that claims to make running Linux containers on Macs very simple. Read along try it out for the first time.

Download and Install

The first step to using container is to download a signed installer package from the GitHub release page

Downloading the latest release from GitHub

After downloading the installation was quick and easy

container command

Now that it is installed, I can launch a terminal and run the “container” command:

container

There are a few different options that you can specify

OVERVIEW: A container platform for macOS

USAGE: container [--debug] <subcommand>

OPTIONS:
  --debug                 Enable debug output [environment: CONTAINER_DEBUG]
  --version               Show the version.
  -h, --help              Show help information.

CONTAINER SUBCOMMANDS:
  create                  Create a new container
  delete, rm              Delete one or more containers
  exec                    Run a new command in a running container
  inspect                 Display information about one or more containers
  kill                    Kill one or more running containers
  list, ls                List containers
  logs                    Fetch container stdio or boot logs
  run                     Run a container
  start                   Start a container
  stop                    Stop one or more running containers

IMAGE SUBCOMMANDS:
  build                   Build an image from a Dockerfile
  images, image, i        Manage images
  registry, r             Manage registry configurations

SYSTEM SUBCOMMANDS:
  builder                 Manage an image builder instance
  system, s               Manage system components

Let’s use the “system” subcommand to start the service:

container system start

You should expect to get something like this:

Verifying apiserver is running...
Installing base container filesystem...
No default kernel configured.                                                                
Install the recommended default kernel from [https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/releases/download/3.17.0/kata-static-3.17.0-arm64.tar.xz]? [Y/n]: 
Installing kernel...

Hello World

Let’s see if we can create a simple container from a Dockerfile and run it. This is about as simple as it gets, create a file named “Dockerfile” and add this to it:

FROM alpine:latest
CMD ["echo","Hello World"]

Now lets build the image:

container build --tag test --file Dockerfile .

It took a while to build because it had to download the alpine image for the first time, but now I have an image! Here is the output:

[+] Building 1.8s (4/4) FINISHED                                                                                                                              
 => [resolver] fetching image...docker.io/library/alpine:latest                                                                                          0.0s
 => [internal] load .dockerignore                                                                                                                        0.0s
 => => transferring context: 2B                                                                                                                          0.0s
 => oci-layout://docker.io/library/alpine:latest@sha256:8a1f59ffb675680d47db6337b49d22281a139e9d709335b492be023728e11715                                 0.1s
 => => resolve docker.io/library/alpine:latest@sha256:8a1f59ffb675680d47db6337b49d22281a139e9d709335b492be023728e11715                                   0.1s
 => => sha256:d69d4d41cfe2ee680d6972795e2a1eb9e4dc4ec3b3c5e0797c9ab43bb3726fa7 4.14MB / 4.14MB                                                           0.0s
 => exporting to oci image format                                                                                                                        0.1s
 => => exporting layers                                                                                                                                  0.0s
 => => exporting manifest sha256:9b0c095b0a85a2fa0b9c602cd979aeea437520a561767655d7d863b28ac35812                                                        0.0s
 => => exporting config sha256:b76eaef5c14cbe329aca41fa7209eaadcbd20cc57af05e4cae258a1a5a288d9f                                                          0.0s
 => => exporting manifest list sha256:0e0507df913a5e943b31e08370ab574db43e891801ac75e1df6a7d2e253e3015                                                   0.0s
 => => sending tarball                                                                                                                                   0.0s
Successfully built test:latest

I should be able to see it in my list of containers:

container image list

Output:

NAME    TAG     DIGEST
alpine  latest  8a1f59ffb675680d47db6337...
test    latest  0e0507df913a5e943b31e083...

The “test” image that I built is listed and also the base image “alpine” that we used. There image are both on my machine now.

Let’s spin up a container named “hello-world” from the image “test”:

container run --name hello-world test

The output is exactly what we expect:

Hello World

This is a very simple example but it shows how easy it is to start using container on Mac.

Next Steps

Here is a sneak peak of what I’m going to do next with Apple container:

container run --name my-grafana grafana/grafana-oss