My Jest test suite went from taking 73.5 seconds to run to only taking 22.9 seconds (on average). How fast is it? Well, the title of this article isn't hyperbole, in fact, it's underselling things. Mutagen does a lot of things and is a very interesting technology in general, but what we're primarily interested in is how it can perform lightning-quick syncs between your local computer and a Docker volume. Compounded, that means that even your average runs are bitterly slow.Įnter Mutagen. As your Docker app runs, it reads and changes files across that sync, which means that every file access slows down your application a little bit more. Sure, it's consistent and compatible, but it's just about the slowest possible option you could go with. The problem is that the default file sync strategy that Docker on MacOS uses is garbage. It turns out that developing with Docker on MacOS can actually be a really enjoyable experience, not just a compromise you make in order to have a portable development environment. In fact, you can get it pretty close to native speed and it's not even all that difficult. Now to get to the root directory /var/lib/docker we must access the docker virtual machine being used on our mac.Docker on MacOS will always be slower than on Linux (well, unless Apple Silicon ends up panning out, which it looks like it might!), but it doesn't have to be as infuriatingly slow as it is by default. When you navigate to ~/Library/Containers you will see the folder name Docker instead. This directory is easy to get to from the terminal, but if you try to get there via the finder you might notice that does not appear visually under that directory name. On a mac our docker files are located inside of a virtual machine which is located in our user library directory: ~/Library/Containers// Here is a little background information on the docker directory

Try option 1 first, if it does not work try option 2 There are two primary ways to get to this directory. You see that command will tell you that the root directory is located at /var/lib/docker, which on a mac is a non-existent directory.

Usually on most systems, you can see where the images and containers are located by running the command docker info but no, that does not work on a mac. Finding the location of docker images is a chore on a mac.

Where is docker on mac