[vicaya]

colima pretty much solves dev experience for docker and k8s on mac, esp. for apple silicons (m1/m2), where you can build multi-arch containers with ease.

Some interesting caveats:

* By default, system packages don't persist, as the default alpine distribution runs on tmpfs and doesn't have a overlay. This is a reasonable default, as it keeps the default VM storage small.

* If you want to have additional system packages, you can turn on a ubuntu overlay that supports additional systemd services just fine. Of course, storage would balloon to a few GBs from a few hundred MBs.

Edit: typos.

BTW, the result of docker build is immediately available to the k8s (k3s) cluster without any insecure registry and/or side loading/caching steps, thanks to the seamless buildkit integration.

[deathanatos]

One more caveat: mounts don't work: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/issues/503

One of our tools runs in Docker just to ensure that it gets the right version of its dependencies, and that bug is a pretty huge bug for us, for that tool, as it basically broke things.

Still, we use colima; it is a decent workaround for the "Docker on macOS" problem otherwise.

[digikata]

For my configurations, enabling mounts with '--mount' is more verbose but works fine. https://docs.docker.com/storage/bind-mounts/

[deathanatos]

Are those flags not essentially synonymous (with perhaps slightly different syntax for their argument)?

… I had noticed that `--mount` in other contexts appears to work, but I have not had the time to investigate why or how that is.

(We've also had bugs with Docker proper in the past where they broke --mount but only for certain paths on the host.)

[digikata]

In my mental map, yes, but in practice, they act a little differently than my intuition. Even on past non-colima docker usage, I came across surprises w/ `-v` vs `--mount` and so generally try both if I'm having problems.