The best way to install Docker.io on Mac OS X is by using Homebrew. At least at the time of writing this.

Before you start make sure you got a decent internet connection. There is going to be a lot of downloading. (Believe it or not but it beats maven).

boot2docker

A Mac isn’t linux it doesn’t have the option of runing LXC (linux containers). The easiest way around that is using boot2docker. It can be installed with brew.

brew install boot2docker

Then initialise and start docker:

boot2docker init boot2docker start

This will have some output. The important part is: export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://:XXXX. Where XXXX is a port. Export this. Eg. run:

export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://:2375

docker

In order to install docker run.

brew install docker

To test the docker installation:

docker run base /bin/echo 'Hello World'

It should output “Hello World”.