Hi @ewanbrightspark 
I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble using Tutor.
I’m not on a Mac, so can’t comment about Mac-specific issues, but you shouldn’t have to run any docker commands directly.
See Installing Tutor for the full docs, but there’s a lot there. So here are the steps I use to get my Tutor dev stack up and running:
# Using python 3.8 or 3.9, with the python3-venv module installed, use a python virtual environment
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
# Install Tutor and all its plugins
pip install "tutor[full]"
# Enable any extra plugins you want
tutor plugins list
tutor plugins enable --help
# This step will ask a few questions, then take care of everything for you, from pulling and building images to starting their services.
tutor dev launch
# Go get a coffee. It'll be 15 min at least
Once it’s done, you’ll see a message like this:
All services initialised.
The platform is now running and can be accessed at the following urls:http://local.edly.io:8000
http://studio.local.edly.io:8001
http://apps.local.edly.io:1999/authn
http://apps.local.edly.io:1997/account
http://apps.local.edly.io:1984/communications
http://apps.local.edly.io:2001/course-authoring
http://apps.local.edly.io:2002/discussions
http://apps.local.edly.io:1994/gradebook
http://apps.local.edly.io:1996/learner-dashboard
http://apps.local.edly.io:2000/learning
http://apps.local.edly.io:1993/ora-grading
http://apps.local.edly.io:1995/profile
The local.edly.io domain is mapped to 127.0.0.1 / localhost, so the domain and subdomains should already be working for you.
But if your build throws errors, or if something isn’t working as expected, could you post the details here?