If you are a developer, you should be using Docker to quickly spin up predictable, preconfigured infrastructure, ranging from database engines to message queues to utility applications. You can then go ahead to persist data from these ephemeral tools if you want.

If you are using macOS, the tool of choice is Orbstack, which I have been using happily for many years.

orbstack

One of the benefits of Orbstack is that (where applicable) it generates a working local URL for each container.

Take, for example, my Kibana container.

orbstackKibana

There are two clickable links:

  1. This will launch Kibana using Orbstack’s generated URL.

    kibanaLocal

  2. This will launch Kibana using a localhost URL with the mapped port.

    KibanaLocalPort

This saves you from having to remember ports and URLs for each container.

TLDR

Orbstack generates (and exposes) clickable links for your running containers.

Happy hacking!