Today I received my Docker Beta invite, so I thought I’d give it a try. The main feature which I’ve been looking forward to was directory mounting done right. You see Docker doesn’t run natively on OSX, but instead you use something like boot2docker that runs in a vm like VirtualBox to house your Docker daemon. This means that mounting directory to your container is a two-step process, first you mount it to the vm machine, then to the container.

Docker Machine makes this one step easier by automatically mounting your /Users directory, so then it feels seamless as long as the directory you’re mounting is under /Users. With Docker Beta, your daemon is running inside xhyve which is a lightweight alternative to VirtualBox and then uses osxfs to manage mounting of your host file system. Okay I know its just another virtualization but the nice thing is that osxfs provides close-to-native experience which just works, no muss, no fuss.

Another thing I noticed is that Docker for Mac comes with a command calls pinata, which is use to manage your Docker configuration. Here’s how you might set an insecure-registry:

pinata set daemon @docker-daemon.json

Where docker-daemon.json:

{
  "storage-driver": "aufs",
  "debug": true,
  "insecure-registry": "my-custom-register.com"
}

You can retrieve the changes using:

pinata get daemon
{"storage-driver":"aufs","debug":true,"insecure-registry":"my-custom-register.com"}

Another nice thing about this is that Docker for Mac can run side-by-side with Docker Toolbox, which means I can still continue using docker-machine and work on multiple Docker daemons.