Docker Desktop alternatives for macOS

As Docker Desktop updated its license to Docker Subscription Service Agreement and is no longer free for professional use, I decided to find alternatives for Docker Desktop on macOS.

This is a convenient note for me to check steps without logging personal stuff on my work computer. I hope it can help you too.

The goal is to replace Docker Desktop without changing my current workflow.

Since I don’t use docker GUI, I only need to replace the VM layer and keep the docker CLI. So, as the VM layer, I use Colima - container runtimes on macOS.

Installation

Install Colima with Homebrew:

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brew install colima

Then, manually install the docker Compose plugin, as Colima doesn’t include it.

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DOCKER_CONFIG=${DOCKER_CONFIG:-$HOME/.docker}
mkdir -p $DOCKER_CONFIG/cli-plugins
curl -SL https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v2.20.3/docker-compose-darwin-aarch64 -o $DOCKER_CONFIG/cli-plugins/docker-compose

chmod +x $DOCKER_CONFIG/cli-plugins/docker-compose

Setup container runtime

The default VM created by Colima has 2 CPUs, 2GiB memory, which is not enough for me as I run projects on Kubernetes. So, to avoid hanging the container runtime, I created a new VM with 6 CPUs and 8GiB memory.

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colima start --cpu 6 --memory 8

Then, I created a soft link to Colima’s Unix socket for the docker (this may require root permission) to have a better experience, as it is not easy for some applications to change the default docker socket path.

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ln -s $(docker context inspect colima -f '{{.Endpoints.docker.Host}}' | sed -e 's/unix:\/\///') /var/run/docker.sock

Test the setup

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docker info
docker compose version