Is it possible to use Mac Os as a container?

Question

turkcankeskin OP

Created Nov ’22

Replies 3

Boosts 0

Views 5.4k

Participants 4

hello developers,

First priority I couldn't find a proper title for the question :(

The reason why I open a topic here is not to find the answer by direct point shooting; My goal is what do Apple, Developer, Companies and Devops teams think and comments about the subject I'm going to ask here?

We use Jenkins as the Devops CI/CD tool at our company, and in Macos/Apple/iOS development, we use a lot of Mac Mini devices. Since we build/compilers on a project-based, version-based basis, we cannot get 100% efficiency from our devices. (For example, because the dependencies of a project are different from other projects; we dedicate only 1 Mac Mini to that project. (As the dependecys of the projects are too many and large, the migration process is very difficult for us, the cost of moving to a lower-level Mac Mini device is high / but this is just an example))

While researching, I saw that there is no docker container image for MacOs X (enterprise or legal) and I know about the Apple EULA. (For virtualization, Apple hardware must be used as a basis. Because the MacOs system is paid for on a device-based basis.)

What I want to ask here is can I find or create a MacOs docker container image legally?

How is the structure of other companies in their CI processes?

If I install MacOs with more than one VMware/VirtualBox on Mac Mini, What harm could it do me in Jenkins? (I'm curious about people's comments on this.)

Boost

Answer 1

Engineer OP

Apple

Nov ’22

What I want to ask here is can I find or create a MacOs docker container image legally?

Docker containers are based on Linux's namespaces for isolation of software on top of a single Linux kernel.

On macOS, the user space uses a different kernel which has a very different interface. You won't find a way to run the macOS stack as a Linux container.

If I install MacOs with more than one VMware/VirtualBox on Mac Mini, What harm could it do me in Jenkins?

It's possible to run up to 2 macOS virtual machines on a Mac. It's a common set up for CI.

The most common pitfalls is how much memory you assign to each VM.

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Answer 2

dualguzhuqing OP

Mar ’23

I have a similar problem. I found that it can be solved by using a virtual framework, and I am exploring how to start multiple virtual machines on a physical machine to share one Xcode to solve this problem. The purpose is to isolate environments in CI/CD scenarios.

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Answer 3

nathan-pierce-veertu OP

Jan ’25

Veertu has built Anka Virtualization to get as close as possible to Docker/containers as possible on macOS (intel and arm). You can use it to run ephemeral macOS VMs from templates of different version of macOS. We have plugins for almost all of the commonly used CI/CD platforms, like Jenkins, Github Actions, etc.

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