Recently, Docker has announced that Docker Desktop will be a paid subscription for corporate users. Couple this with the latest Apple M1 chipset on the latest Macbooks, that still has limited support by the Virtual Machine vendors, and the community has a reason to look for alternatives.

Canonical (the makers of Ubuntu) has released Multipass, a dedicated Ubuntu VM-as-a-Service capability that fully supports the Apple M1 chip. With this, and in about 5 minutes of your time (depending on download speeds), you can get Docker running on your M1 Macbook.

Edit: I have created a script to automate the entire process!

Here is the repo: https://gitlab.com/scottbri/docker-on-m1

Installation

This installation assumes that homebrew is already installed. The script will fully automate the installation of docker, docker-compose, and multipass using homebrew.

We will use the name dockervm for the multipass ubuntu vm instance name.

Usage

bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://gitlab.com/scottbri/docker-on-m1/-/raw/main/install.sh)”

How to do it manually:

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