Ask HN: Docker for a Mac App? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Docker for a Mac App?

4 pointsgmzi15 comments

Hi folks, I'm building a Mac utility to extract and process data from local PDF files. I use Python for crawling PDFs and Java for processing the data. I'd like to be able to share this program with other computers (mostly Macs and a couple with Windows) that don't have Python or Java installed. I've heard Docker might be a solution, but since I've never used it before, I'd like to ask you all if Docker is the right tool for this task or if there's a better one I should consider studying. In any case, it will be my first experience with containers. All hints are very welcome, and thanks!

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As other comments have mentioned, this isn't what Docker is for.

For Python, you'd use something like Py2App or whatever the current thing is. And Py2Exe for Windows.

https://py2app.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

https://pypi.org/project/py2exe/

PS: I typed your question into GPT 4 verbatim and it pointed me to PyInstaller, as well.

https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/

Thanks runjake for these resources, looking forward to dive into them as soon as I have script and dependencies ready to package

Are your users technical enough to run containers and install Docker Desktop / Colima?

Thanks verdverm, my user's aren't technical at all, they can install a .dmg file in their macs, but nothing beyond that

I don’t think you can use Docker for those users. I follow the Colima development from far by looking at their GitHub issues and releases and you don’t want to deal with such complexity with non technical users.

This sounds like a horribly bloated stack. Might it be possible to compile the Python part into a lib that the Java app can access? And then package the Java app as a distributable, maybe with a JRE bundled?

Thanks solardev, I've managed to get Java out of the stack replacing it with a Python package. Still horrible but not bloated anymore :). Now I'm looking for options to package a Python app, that seems to be way easier, so many new things for me here

That's so much cleaner!

If your audience is developers (or similarly tech-savvy), that's probably enough to package it up as `brew install my_pdf_parser` for Macs (and Chocolatey for Windows) and have them take care of the Python deps.

If you're going for a mainstream desktop app though, that's a bit harder, but there's stuff like https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/ (edit: as you already mentioned in another comment, lol)

No, Docker is not right for this, mostly because Docker does not actually run on Mac; it runs on a Linux VM. MacOS doesn't really support containers.

I would suggest looking at Homebrew.

containers on mac go through a VM

Many, many developers use Docker on Mac without issue

There is Docker Desktop and Colima you can use

There's two different things here.

Q: I need to run existing Docker containers on my Mac.

A: You have to use a VM; it's no big deal.

Q: What's the best way to package a new native Mac app?

A: Not containers.

Thank you very much, wmf, for clarifying. I am doing some research to replace the Java dependencies with Python exclusively, so I can create a .dmg installer using PyInstaller or similar tool. This appears to be a more straightforward approach

Take note, building .dmg or .exe of python apps may cause anti-viruses to panic when your users run the apps, they can add exceptions but I would recommend doing proper research into this.

Docker on Mac creates Linux VMs though and this creates really slow file system abstractions for bigger folders.

Python is cross-platform. Java is cross-platform.

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