Use Lima as a Docker Desktop replacement on MacOS

Lima (short for Linux on Mac) is a Virtual Machine management tool for running Linux boxes (think Vagrant, but for development tooling). It focuses on offering a convenient way to run and interact with containerd, but its high customizability allows for a lot more. The examples folder in its repository gives a good idea of its capabilities.

For running Lima as a Docker Desktop replacement, the official example provided is a great starting point with a few shortcomings:

• mounting only a temporary folder (/tmp/lima) as writable
• not including support for building and running multi-arch containers

To circumvent these issues, download this YAML and run:

limactl start docker.yml

If docker login gives you trouble, make sure that ~/.docker/config.json uses osxkeychain as the credsStore. Example:

{
  "auths": {},
  "credsStore": "osxkeychain"
}

Considerations about chown and chmod

Lima uses Reverse SSHFS by default to mount folders from host to guest. This strategy provides good compatibility but can cause problems in some cases. For instance, Containers that run chown on startup like Jupyter and Gogs might not be able to start up at all.

In some situations, you might need to experiment with 9p and reverse-sshfs as mount types.

Further reading

Filesystem mounts available for Lima

VM customization options