Is there an App-V / Docker equivalent for Mac OSX?

Question

Windows has a application-virtualisation tool called App-V.

Linux appears to have a similar tool called Docker.

My question is - is there a Docker equivalent for MacOS X? (ie without having to spin up a Linux virtual machine on VirtualBox?)

Answer 1

There is no strict analog for OS X. If you are against spinning up a virtual Linux machine, your options are:

1. A simple chroot jail. The jailkit utility can help you out with this.

2. For your own OS X applications, using App Sandbox to limit the resources your app has access to.

Again, neither of these is just like Docker 0.x, which uses LXC under the covers.

The chroot solution is closer, since it is one of the components that LXC is built on. However, it doesn't provide kernel namespaces or anything like cgroups — both of which are two very important parts of LXC.