Run MacOS VM’s in Docker on Windows & Linux with Docker-OSX

If you use Docker and virtual machines often, you may be happy to know that you can run MacOS VM’s in Docker, at near native performance atop Windows or Linux, thanks to an open source project called Docker-OSX. Yes, that means you can run MacOS on a PC, whether that PC is running Windows or Linux. Docker-OSX includes support for iMessage, and iPhone/iPad USB connections too, allowing for a robust MacOS experience, despite being on a PC.

For the unfamiliar, Docker is a platform that makes it easy to automate and deploy virtual machines and applications in containers. These containers include the full operating system, apps, and relevant dependencies, making the environment consistent and portable, plus there’s versioning and rollback capabilities, and this all works flawlessly regardless of what the host operating system is, or where it’s located. Docker is very popular in the tech world, since it makes testing, research, and development much more consistent and easy, and because the containers are isolated, you can go all out and muck around without worrying about messing up the host operating system. Docker-OSX expands all of this greatness to allow MacOS virtual machines to to run in Docker on Windows, or Linux, and is a fantastic project for anyone interested in tinkering with MacOS from a PC (for what it’s worth, you can also run MacOS Docker containers natively on a Mac, but that’s separate from what we’re discussing here).

• Check out Docker-OSX here at Github

In case it wasn’t obvious, this is a bit advanced, and aimed at advanced users, developers, tinkerers, hackers, DevOps, or just the merely curious and technically capable, so if you’re a more casual user you may be a bit overwhelmed by the setup process.

The video embedded below goes through the setup process as well, and may be a useful resource if you’re looking to either deploy this yourself or get an idea of the entire setup procedure before diving in:

You may already know that you can now deploy native MacOS Docker containers by using MacOSContainers and Homebrew, but it’s certainly nice to know that you can also run MacOS in Docker on a Windows PC or Linux PC. Check it out, if you’re into this kind of thing.