docker-mac-net-connect

I've not done serious networking stuff for over two decades, and never in as complex an environment as that in the article, so the networking part of the article went pretty much over my head. What I want to do when running a Docker container on Mac is to be able to have the container have an IP address separate from the Mac's IP address that applications on the Mac see. No port mapping: if the container has a web server on port 80 I want to access it at container_ip:80, not 127.0.0.1:2000 or something that gets mapped to container port 80. On Linux I'd just used Docker bridged networking and I believe that would work, but on Mac that just bridges to the Linux VM running under the hypervisor rather than to the Mac. Is there some officially recommended and supported way to do this? For a while I did it by running WireGuard on the Linux VM

While this may not solve your problem, I use docker-network-connect which lets me connect directly to containers running in the 172.x.x.x range. By default, macOS does not support routing from host to containers by IP https://github.com/chipmk/docker-mac-net-connect. In the kubernetes case (I am using k3d on my Mac) pods aren't directly routable but with metallb, load balancer IP addresses can be connected to directly and there's no worry about port conflicts as there might be with k3d's default servicelb implementation (this is my bootstrap script https://github.com/andrewmackrodt/k3d-boot). If you need to connect to specific pods directly and it doesn't make sense to change your pod config, kubectl port-forward may suffice?