How to switch from Docker Desktop to Colima for local development

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.