Docker Desktop alternative for MacOS

Starting in February 2022, Docker Desktop became a paid service for large teams. This may be a reason to look for alternatives to Docker Desktop.

In my case one day Docker Desktop just stopped opening. The default solution of uninstalling and re-installing didn’t work. I didn’t have enough time to figure out the problem. So I looked for alternatives to running containers on macOS locally.

One of the projects I looked at is Colima. I found it minimalistic to install and easy to use. Colima supports M1 & Intel chips, port forwarding, volume mounts, docker-compose & kubernetes. Basically everything you need for local development.

How to install Colima?

Install docker & docker-compose client (just clients to interact with Colima containers runtime):

brew install docker
brew install docker-compose

Then install Colima:

brew install colima

Usage

Start Colima is easy:

colima start

That’s it. Now you can run your docker-compose files and everything works. To stop Colima:

colima stop

Colima also support different profiles, kubernetes, etc. You can check start options in docs or by:

colima start --help

Customising

By default Colima runs with 2 CPUs, 2GiB memory and 60GiB storage. This is not enough for me so these settings can be changed:

# stop VM before apply changes
colima stop
# this will change configuration of exits VM
colima start --cpu 2 --memory 4
# or by changing config file
colima start --edit

Possible problems

If you are using utilities such as dry or dive, they may not start with the error like “docker.sock not found”. This is easy to fix:

sudo ln -sf ~/.colima/docker.sock /var/run/docker.sock

That’s all for now. I hope that article was useful for you. If yes, don’t forget to follow me to get new updates.