Docker and OS X El Capitan

The folks at lando have been doing a lot of great work lately. I’ve noticed the performance improving with the latest builds (early alpha/beta versions often felt quite slow on older hardware). Speaking of older hardware, my laptop at home is a pre-Retina Macbook Pro 13″ that maxes out at OS X (not even MacOS!) El Capitan, so despite my advice to my colleague Chris, I tried updating to the latest version (v3.0.0-rc.12).

That’s…where my adventure started.

My Macbook can’t run the the latest version of Docker, so I’ve always left off updating that, and I also usually leave it running when updating lando. Well, this time I quit Docker before installing lando—just like the instructions say, mind you—and it updated Docker to the latest version.

No problem, I thought, I’ll just downgrade to the last version compatible with El Capitan, which Docker thankfully provides links to in the release notes. I installed version 18.06.1-ce-mac73 2018-08-29 but ended up with an error:

communication with networking components failed

A bit of searching turned up a helpful Github issue: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/777, which suggested deleting /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.docker.vmnetd. I did that, restarted Docker, and I was back in business.