Thanks all for your feedback. I need to discuss this internally with my colleagues. It's really an experiment but I had 3 motivations:. we currently use a custom protocol to forward ports exposed with docker run -p and were wondering if we could switch to SOCKS instead to simplify part of the system.
we had some reliability problems with the vmnet.framework solution in the past. Sometimes it would get into a stuck state and the whole machine would need to be rebooted to fix it (or at least, we never found where the bad state was located). We did report this to Apple and it may have been fixed by now. we were wondering if it would be useful to use SOCKS as a cheap kind of VPN to connect to other places - maybe if you had a remote cluster and wanted to directly talk to the containers there. Maybe you want to attach yourself to a swarm overlay network (or similar). I'm not sure how useful this is.
Document Network On Docker For Macos
I tried setup instructions from with release 18.06.0-ce-rc3-mac68 (26342), but I couldn't access proxy service from OSX using simple telnet connect. At the beginning I thought the issue is caused by socks service is listening internally 127.0.01, but I tested that theory out with previous experimental build with 18.03.0-ce-rc2-mac56 (23206) and I was able to connect form osx while socks was configure to listen 127.0.0.1. I only wonder that some routing is missing in the latest build or something else.