I moved Docker to a remote machine

In order to avoid having to micromanage my disk space on my MacBook, I moved Docker to a Linux VM running on one of my computers at home.

I have a 500‑gigabyte MacBook Pro M1 Max. Yes, an M1 Max for doing nothing but coding because I thought that having the beefiest CPU would give me some bragging rights. But it turns out only I’m impressed.

500 gigabytes turns out not to be enough for development and for having any reasonably sized applications, IDE, or laptop. Docker was taking up a lot of space locally, and I found myself with many build artifacts, caches, and containers—essentially doing a whole lot of system cleanup just to maintain space. It got to the point where I considered upgrading to the newer MacBook with the two‑terabyte storage option, but that feeling passed when Apple raised their prices by about $800.

I booted up a Linux virtual machine on my TrueNAS system and installed RustDesk on it so I can access it with a GUI. I know you can use Mac Finder, but it doesn't allow copy and paste. I like RustDesk because I can work from my local machine, paste whatever I need, and transfer files to the remote machine.

And since I have my own home lab setup, I kind of like the idea of centralizing a lot of my development stuff to places that aren't on one particular laptop. So I'm going to use Docker on this VM to host my database for all of my local development, any running containers, and I will be using that to do my development.

There's really not a whole lot to this. I just got to the point where I wanted to free up some space, and Docker was taking up many tens of gigabytes.