This project is no longer maintained as my team have moved away from developing on MacOS. A more active project with similar aims may be found here. For those that prefer the approach taken by this project, there are several forks that may offer some support for newer versions of Docker and can be found via the network and forks pages of this repo.

Docker for Mac - Host Bridge

As of the time of writing Docker for Mac can't access containers via IP from the host. Let's fix that.

It's worth remembering that this appears to be a commonly requested feature, so it might be worth checking to see if it's been fixed in recent versions.

Approach

Add an additional network interface (provided by tuntap OSX) to moby (the VM containing the Linux kernel and Docker daemon) that's also accessible to the host. Create a docker bridge network and then, inside moby, add the tap backed interface to the network's bridge thus providing direct conectivity to the host.

Install

1. Download the tuntap OSX kernel extensions
2. Extract the .pkg file within the tuntap archive
3. Download install.sh
4. (Optional, but encouraged) Read install.sh!
5. Run install.sh (see example below)

n.b. There are several environment variable settings.

# DOCKER_TAP_NETWORK=acme ./install.sh tuntap_20150118.pkg
Install tuntap kernel extension
Password: ***************
installer: Package name is TunTap Installer package
installer: Upgrading at base path /
installer: The upgrade was successful.
Ensure tap extension is loaded
Permit non-root usage of tap1 device
Move original com.docker.hyperkit
Install com.docker.hyperkit shim
>>>>>>> RESTART DOCKER NOW <<<<<<<
When docker is responding (i.e. docker image ls), press return:
Create host-accessible network
efe009821235c9568f7ee66d882c22ce94edefa446abefb0159c392ac6024dbb
Bridge tap into docker network
Assign the network gateway IP to the tap interface

# docker container run -d --net acme --rm nginx:alpine
796c40fb6c78f769d502d21f2a339d08d2c75f545c579a41b6f4f7966e23ae1d

# docker container inspect -f '{{.NetworkSettings.Networks.acme.IPAddress}}' 796c40fb6c78
172.18.0.2

# curl -I 172.18.0.2
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.11.12
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2017 04:23:09 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 612
Last-Modified: Mon, 27 Mar 2017 19:48:13 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
ETag: "58d96c7d-264"
Accept-Ranges: bytes

# docker container stop 796c40fb6c78
796c40fb6c78

WARNING:

Unfortunately install.sh must currently be run after every restart of Docker. This is because both moby and the tap interface only persist while Docker is running. Hopefully this can be improved upon in the future.

Uninstall

There's no dedicated uninstaller, but the process is fairly simple:

1. Move com.docker.hyperkit.real back to com.docker.hyperkit
2. Reboot Docker
3. Restore the owner of the chosen tap device to root, or alternatively
4. Removal instructions for tuntap OSX can be found in their FAQ.

Thanks

• Michael Henkel -- Without these forum posts this wouldn't exist.
• tuntaposx.sourceforge.net
• @tinychaos42 and @idio -- Without whose Mac this investigation wouldn't have been possible.
• @muz -- Without whose beta testing containers wouldn't even have internet. >_>;;