Docker/Colima setup on a Mac

I dislike Docker Desktop because I prefer to work on the command line and it’s always been more of an inconvenience to me. Plus with the licensing changes it’s expensive to use for a lot of companies. Either way, I prefer just using the command line tools so it doesn’t give me much benefit.

Instead, I’ve setup Colima and use the docker command line tools around that.

First step was to install docker and docker-compose using brew. This gives me the docker command line tools I need.

brew install docker docker-compose

Then I installed colima with:

brew install colima

To make sure colima starts up automatically:

brew services start colima

As docker compose is a plugin, I need to add some config to .docker/config.json so it can find the plugins installed by homebrew. This is done after installing colima, as that will create the config.json file for us.

"cliPluginsExtraDirs": [
  "/opt/homebrew/lib/docker/cli-plugins"
]

Finally, to support other, older docker tools, it’s helpful to set the DOCKER_HOME environment variable. I added the following to my .bash_profile:

export COLIMA_HOME="$HOME/.colima/"
export DOCKER_HOST="unix://${COLIMA_HOME}/default/docker.sock"