For this chapter, you will need a laptop or a workstation with either macOS or Windows, preferably Windows 10 Professional, installed. You should also have free internet access to download applications and the permission to install those applications on your laptop.

Docker containers were first developed on Linux for Linux. It is thus natural that the primary command-line tool used to work with Docker, also called a shell, is a Unix shell; remember, Linux derives from Unix. Most developers use the Bash shell. On some lightweight Linux distributions, such as Alpine, Bash is not installed and consequently one has to use the simpler Bourne shell, just called sh. Whenever we are working in a Linux environment, such as inside a container or on a Linux VM, we will use either /bin/bash or /bin/sh, depending on their availability.

Although macOS X is not a Linux OS, Linux and OS X are both flavors of Unix and thus support the same types of tools. Among those tools are the shells. So, when working on a Mac, you will probably be using the Bash shell.

In this book, we expect from the readers a familiarity with the most basic...

On a Windows computer, laptop, or server, we have multiple command-line tools available. The most familiar is the command shell. It has been available on any Windows computer for decades. It is a very simple shell. For more advanced scripting, Microsoft has developed PowerShell. PowerShell is very powerful and very popular among engineers working on Windows. On Windows 10, finally, we have the so-called Windows Subsystem for Linux, which allows us to use any Linux tool, such as the Bash or Bourne shells. Apart from this, there also exist other tools that install a Bash shell on Windows, for example, the Git Bash shell. In this book, all commands will use Bash syntax. Most of the commands also run in PowerShell.

Our recommendation for you is thus to either use PowerShell or any other Bash tool to work with Docker on Windows.

The easiest way to install software on a Mac or Windows laptop is to use a good package manager. On a Mac, most people use Homebrew and on Windows, Chocolatey is a good choice.

Installing Homebrew on a Mac is easy; just follow the instructions at https://brew.sh/.

The following is the command to install Homebrew:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Once the installation is finished, test whether Homebrew is working by entering brew --version in the Terminal. You should see something like this:

$ brew --version
Homebrew 1.4.3
Homebrew/homebrew-core (git revision f4e35; last commit 2018-01-11...

Using a good code editor is essential to working productively with Docker. Of course, which editor is the best is highly controversial and depends on your personal preference. A lot of people use Vim, or others such as Emacs, Atom, Sublime, or Visual Studio (VS) Code, to just name a few. If you have not yet decided which editor is best suited for you, then I highly recommend that you try VS Code. This is a free and lightweight editor, yet it is very powerful and is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Give it a try. You can download VS Code from https://code.visualstudio.com/download.

But if you already have a favorite code editor, then please continue using it. As long as you can edit text files, you're good to go. If your editor supports syntax highlighting for Dockerfiles and JSON and YAML files, then even better.

Docker Toolbox has been available for developers for a few years. It precedes the newer tools such as Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows. The toolbox allows a user to work very elegantly with containers on any Mac or Windows computer. Containers must run on a Linux host. Neither Windows or Mac can run containers natively. Thus, we need to run a Linux VM on our laptop, where we can then run our containers. Docker Toolbox installs VirtualBox on our laptop, which is used to run the Linux VMs we need.

If you are using a Mac or have Windows 10 Professional installed on your laptop, then we strongly recommend that you install Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows. These tools give you the best experience when working with containers. Note, older versions of Windows or Windows 10 Home edition cannot run Docker for Windows. Docker for Windows uses Hyper-V to run containers transparently in a VM but Hyper-V is not available on older versions of Windows nor is it available in the Home edition.

Navigate to the following link to download Docker for Mac at https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/install/.