What is Colima?
Per the official documentation:
- “Colima means Containers in Lima.”1
- “Colima is basically a higher level usage of Lima and utilizes Lima to provide Docker, Containerd and/or Kubernetes.”2
- “Since Lima is aka Linux on Mac. By transitivity, Colima can also mean Containers on Linux on Mac.”3
Per ChatGPT:
“It is a platform for managing and deploying Docker containers, which provides features such as orchestration, scaling, and automation.”
Why switch to Colima?
I found this blog postfrom the DDEV maintainer, Randy Fay, where we can see that the performance gains of Colima over the Docker Desktop alternative are significant. Colima is an open-source tool.
The recipe
Take a database backup, of your sites, so you can reimport them later.
Uninstall Docker Desktop following the steps at https://docs.docker.com/desktop/uninstall/
In the terminal, we will need to run the following commands:
brew install docker #This is needed only if docker is not already installed.
brew install colima
colima start --cpu 4 --memory 6 --disk 100
Conclusions
I have been using Colima for more than a week now, and working on web projects feels faster than when I used the docker desktop alternative. I have not had any issues so far, so I think that I will make Colima one of my favorite docker add-ons from now.
If you are wondering how it can be used with real PHP projects, I recommend looking at this post where I explain how to use DDEV for setting up WordPress and Drupal projects locally.
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