Share FIFO (named pipe) and unix sockets with host on macOS?

[KevSlashNull]

Sharing a named pipe (fifo) or unix socket is possible with Linux on Docker but seems to not work with Colima.

I assume this isn’t possible because we are creating pipes/sockets across file systems. So we are creating a pipe in the VM on an ext4 filesystem. The volume layer then creates a new distinct pipe in macOS on the APFS filesystem?

The following example works across containers with a named volume, which somewhat validates my assumption.

Is there a way to share unix sockets and named pipes with the host using a vz machine? I also searched in the lima repository for this. There is some talk about qemu and named pipes (though it seems unrelated) but I’d really like to use VZ.

Example

First, create a container:

docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/host alpine

Then use mkfifo testpipe to create a named pipe called testpipe. In the container, run echo "hi" > testpipe. On the host run cat testpipe.

If you run this on Linux with Docker, the host machine will output "hi" to the console. Using Colima on macOS, this hangs.