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On the site, Docker recommend using the Docker Toolbox to get up and running with it. I’m personally not much of a fan of these “platform” installers; in attempting to provide a common solution for most, people like me end up fighting with it. Fortunately, this can all be done standlone through Homebrew. Here’s how to do it:

brew install docker docker-machine

This pulls in the docker executable and the new(er) way to managing machines (as you can’t use Docker directly on OS X): docker-machine.

Creating a Local Docker Machine

This will pull in a recent boot2docker image (platform dependent). You’ll then need to set the environment variables so that Docker knows to use it.

docker-machine create main
eval $(docker-machine env main)

The eval will set the following bits of configuration (although it’d vary for you):

export DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY="1"
export DOCKER_HOST="tcp://192.168.237.131:2376"
export DOCKER_CERT_PATH="/Users/nickcharlton/.docker/machine/machines/main"
export DOCKER_MACHINE_NAME="main"

…with VMware Fusion

But, I prefer to use VMware Fusion for running VMs, so I do it this way instead:

docker-machine create --driver vmwarefusion main
eval $(docker-machine env main)

There we go. Docker that can be done nicely as with any other tool through Homebrew.