You may also need to enable experimental Docker CLI features, by editing ~/.docker/config.json and setting experimental to enabled. To accomplish this, use Docker's new buildx command that can build images for multiple architectures.įirstly, tell Docker to use buildkit, and tell docker-compose to use Docker's CLI instead of its own python Docker client: export DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 This is slower than running the container natively, uses more memory, and may not provide everything the container needs. Note: Docker for Mac uses QEMU to virtualise (or emulate?) an amd64 host when running amd64 containers. However, if there's a service which uses a base image that's only available for amd64, or there are some old dependencies which are only available for amd64, or the service won't run in an arm64 container for some reason, then you'll need to specify the target platform for this particular service. Note: the normalization for the 'platform specifier' ( amd64, arm64, etc) is defined in the code for containerd. If you're lucky, you can run docker-compose build, then docker-compose up, and everything will be fine - it'll pull linux/arm64 base images, install arm64 packages using the package manager of the operating system in the container, build your image and run the service with no problems.

Imagine you've got a new Macbook with an ARM-based processor (Apple M1), and you're trying to build a collection of services defined in a docker-compose.yml file.Įach service definition has a build property which points to a folder containing a Dockerfile.

For more precision, use docker buildx bake to build each image for a specific architecture. MaTLDR: In general, setting DOCKER_DEFAULT_PLATFORM=linux/amd64 will tell Docker to build amd64 images.

Docker on mac m1