---
title: Docker Desktop alternative for MacOS
slug: colima-macos
date: 2022-07-22
taxonomies:
  tags: ["docker", "macos", "tools"]
extra:
  medium: https://medium.com/p/84a179040340
---

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](https://github.com/abiosoft/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):

```sh
brew install docker
brew install docker-compose
```

Then install Colima:

```sh
brew install colima
```

## Usage

Start Colima is easy:

```sh
colima start
```

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

```sh
colima stop
```

Colima also support different profiles, kubernetes, etc. You can check start options in [docs](https://github.com/abiosoft/colima#usage) or by:

```sh
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:

```sh
# 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](https://github.com/moncho/dry) or [dive](https://github.com/wagoodman/dive), they may not start with the error like “docker.sock not found”. This is easy to fix:

```sh
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.