What is colima?

Colima (https://github.com/abiosoft/colima) means Containers in Lima (https://github.com/lima-vm/lima). Lima is linux virtual machines, typically on macOS, for running containerd.

Containerd is the container runtime of docker engine that used to get installed as part of Docker for mac.

Colima uses lima that runs containerd hence this is a drop in replacement of Docker for mac.

Steps:

1) Uninstall “Docker for Mac” (Settings » Uninstall)

Go to Applications folder in mac and move Docker.app to bin.

2) Install colima using brew

brew install colima

3) Install Docker

brew install docker

If there is any warning for docker already installed then run the below command:

brew link docker

Verify installation by entering docker in terminal and press enter.

4) Install docker-compose

brew install docker-compose

Verify docker-compose by entering

docker-compose version

5) Start colima

colima start --cpu 4 --memory 12 --disk 100

You can choose for yourself how much amount of CPU, RAM and disk storage you would like to allocate in the above command.

If the above command fails because of some network error then run the same command again.

You can check its status by entering

colima status

6) After uninstalling “Docker for Desktop”, the tiny VM on your mac that contains all the volumes and images gets deleted. Hence you need to again build images for any of your application again or pull them again from docker hub. These images will get stored in VM instantiated by colima.

In case you face any issues like below

=> ERROR COPY target/build-info/* /build-info/ —– failed to solve: lstat /var/lib/docker/tmp/buildkit-mount38899890/target/build-info: no such file or directory make: *** [docker-up] Error 17

then export the below environment variable in your terminal (as well as bashrc file or zsh profile

export DOCKER_BUILDKIT=0