Docker X11 macOS

docker_x11_macOS.md

Preamble

There is a longstanding issue/missing feature/bug with sockets on Docker on macOS; it may never work; you'll need to use a network connection between Docker containers and X11 on macOS for the foreseeable future.

I started from this gist and made some adjustments:

• the volume mappings aren't relevant/used, due to the socket issue above.
• this method only allows X11 connections from your Mac, not the entire local network, which would include everyone on the café/airport WiFi.
• updated to include using the host.docker.internal name for the the container host, instead.
• you have to restart XQuartz after the config change.

Assumptions

• you have a docker image with x11-apps (or the equivalent for not-ubuntu) installed
• you have XQuartz installed (ie from Homebrew, brew cask install xquartz) and your PATH updated to include /opt/X11/bin and/or /usr/X11/bin.

Set up XQuartz

1. Launch XQuartz. Under the XQuartz menu, select Preferences
2. Go to the security tab and ensure "Allow connections from network clients" is checked.
3. Restart XQuartz.

Every time you want to run an X11 program

1. Make sure X11 is accepting connections from your host with xhost +$(hostname).local (if your Mac's name is So-and-So's Computer, you will need to do some fancy quoting and escaping).
2. Set your DISPLAY environment variable to :0, eg export DISPLAY=:0.
3. Test it from your Mac with xeyes.
4. It works? Cool, one step fancier, from a container: docker run --rm -e DISPLAY=host.docker.internal:0 -it some-container-name xeyes

M1 Pro macOS Monterey 12.3, works here too. Simply adding "-e DISPLAY=host.docker.internal:0" to runArgs fixed it.

Mounting the volume like you would on a linux machine - "--volume=/tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix", with a containerEnv for the display - worked on my macOS machine for a couple months. Stopped working for some reason but this way works.

Appreciate the thread and gist.

Instead of xhost +localhost, you can use xauth for even better security. First, you need to copy the magic cookie for :0 so that it is used also with the magic host.docker.internal address (192.168.65.2):

xauth add $(xauth list $DISPLAY | awk '{$1="192.168.65.2:0"; print}')

Then, add -v ~/.Xauthority:/tmp/.Xauthority -e XAUTHORITY=/tmp/.Xauthority to the Docker command line. Now it should work without xhost.

Unfortunately, this is not working for me.
How can I get it to work without using xhost + localhost every time?