October 03, 2022
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 what it’s capable.
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 - using sshfs as the mount type (this can cause problems with containers that run
chown
on startup like Jupyter and Gogs) - 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"
}