Also worth checking out is Colima, which uses Lima to give you a linux container environment without needing to install Docker Desktop:
Some interesting caveats:
* By default, system packages don't persist, as the default alpine distribution runs on tmpfs and doesn't have a overlay. This is a reasonable default, as it keeps the default VM storage small.
* If you want to have additional system packages, you can turn on a ubuntu overlay that supports additional systemd services just fine. Of course, storage would balloon to a few GBs from a few hundred MBs.
Edit: typos.
BTW, the result of docker build is immediately available to the k8s (k3s) cluster without any insecure registry and/or side loading/caching steps, thanks to the seamless buildkit integration.
One of our tools runs in Docker just to ensure that it gets the right version of its dependencies, and that bug is a pretty huge bug for us, for that tool, as it basically broke things.
Still, we use colima; it is a decent workaround for the "Docker on macOS" problem otherwise.
… I had noticed that `--mount` in other contexts appears to work, but I have not had the time to investigate why or how that is.
(We've also had bugs with Docker proper in the past where they broke --mount but only for certain paths on the host.)
> Finch provides a simple client which is integrated with nerdctl. For the core build/run/push/pull commands, Finch depends upon nerdctl to handle the heavy lifting. It works with containerd for container management, and with BuildKit to handle Open Container Initiative (OCI) image builds. These components are all pulled together and run within a virtual machine managed by Lima.
There's one issue I'm running into where it becomes unresponsive after a while and "docker ps" hangs forever though.
Docker Desktop is a bad joke.
Recommended.
If you want to draw some very coarse comparisons with big names, lima is like VMware Fusion, colima is like the Docker for Mac app.
colima kind of fills one of the use cases of docker-machine which kind of died as this use case was handled by DfM and the other use case (handling machines for swarm) was folded into docker swarm and docker compose.
Colima is a low-configuration command line tool to spin up a linux VM (using Lima) which includes docker support, so you can run docker commands in the Mac terminal but the containers actually run in the linux VM.
You still have to install the actual docker CLI tool separately via Homebrew etc. Colima just provides everything else.
This is also what happens generally when you install and run Docker Desktop on Mac or Windows, I just like Colima because it’s a much lighter installation and doesn’t come with the commercial paid license requirement of Docker Desktop.