Apple Containers 0.3.0 on macOS 15 Cheatsheet

README.md

Upgrading to 0.3.0

Before be sure you properly upgraded to containers 0.3.0. Clean the old installation with sudo uninstall-container.sh -k and then install the new version. Then start containers service container system start. Check if it downloaded the latest vminit image. container i ls If not then try sudo uninstall-container.sh -d that deletes everything including the user data.

Configure the Networking

Setting the conainer subnet seems to be only necessary for macOS 15. Lookup the subnet of the bridge network with ifconfig. Look for the bridge, e.g.

bridge100: flags=8a63<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,ALLMULTI,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        options=63<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,TSO4,TSO6>
        ether be:d0:74:63:61:64
        inet 192.168.206.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.206.255

Then set your container subnet to match the bridge network: defaults write com.apple.container.defaults network.subnet 192.168.206.1/24

Set a local domain, I'm using home: defaults write com.apple.container.defaults dns.domain "home" If you named the container, you can now just use {container name}.home to connect to it.

PostgreSQL Example

container run -d --name postgres -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres --rm --mount source=${HOME}/work/data/postgres,target=/var/lib/postgresql postgres:latest

Now you can do psql -h postgres.home -U postgres

You can install postgres clients with brew install libpq; brew link --force libpq

Port forwarding on macOS 15

If you really need forwarding ports to localhost, it will also work now. Now you can try the example from the docs.

container run -d --rm -p 127.0.0.1:8080:8000 python:slim python3 -m http.server --bind 0.0.0.0 8000

Wait until the container is up then curl http:localhost:8080 to verify