My MacDventure Part 1: Setting Up Container-based C/C++ development Environment

So there I was, with the gift of a brand new MacBook Air. Over the past
decade and a half, my primary daily drivers have ALL been Linux.

However, recently I decided to try something new. That something new
involved getting a MacBook Air.

I’ve been looking for a good coding platform, and most of the professional
software engineers I know RAVE about how great Macs are. Well, Macs are
Unix after all, and Unix is very similar to Linux. Therefore, I should be
right at home. What could go wrong? Right????

I’ll save screen space by not ranting in frustration and will instead focus
on providing a productive guide to help fellow Linux users find a
navigable path as they embark on their Macdventure.

What better way to start than by setting up your container-based developer
tools without relying on the App Store or other elements of the Macaverse?

Docker will not be used, since it looks a bit fishy, or rather shrimpy, on the Mac. I will be utilizing Podman instead.

Podman implementation on Mac works slightly differently than on Linux.
It runs inside a Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) 41 (as of this writing) virtual
machine (VM).
Note the VM initialization steps in the instructions below.

Installing Podman

Download Podman .pkg package from the official podman github release page
Download the checkums from the official podman github release page and save the checksums in a file named shasums in the same directory as the podman .pkg package
Verify the checksums:
```
sha256sum -c --ignore-missing shasums
```

Install podman system-wide

sudo installer -pkg podman-installer-macos-arm64.pkg -target LocalSystem

Initialize Podman VM

Initialize podman FCOS VM

podman machine init devvm
podman machine start devvm

Shelling into FCOS
```
podman machine ssh <vm-name>
```
Update FCOS VM, install vim or other packages as needed
```
sudo dnf update -y && dnf install vim
```

Restart FCOS VM after update

podman machine stop devvm
podman machine start devvm

Optionally Install podman-compose
```
sudo dnf install vim podman-compose -y
```

Setting Up a Debian-Based C/C++ Development Environment

Create a Dockerfile with the following content

FROM docker.io/library/debian:latest

RUN apt update && apt upgrade -y && \
apt install build-essential vim git cpputest gdb cmake -y && \
useradd developer -m -s /bin/bash 

USER 1000:1000
WORKDIR /home/developer
ENTRYPOINT /bin/bash

Build a developement container image mydebian:dev

podman build -f Dockerfile.debian -t mydebian:dev .

Create a local code directory on the Mac side which will be mounted into the mydebian:dev image at /home/developer/code.
```
mkdir code
```

Start the container and mount local code directory into it

podman run -ti --rm --name mydebian -v $(pwd)/code:/home/developer/code mydebian:dev 

While in the container, create a “hello world code snippet”, named hello.c with the following content:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#define MSG "Hello, Mac!\n"


int main() {
  printf(MSG);
  exit(0);
}

Compile and run it.
```
gcc -o hello hello.c
./hello
```

That should be enough to get started coding in C/C++.

Cheers!