Davit, a Apple Containers UI

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• Hacker News
• > Tiny. A single ~17 MB app

  Oh goodness what have we come to? I know we're comparing to electron monstrosities, but still

  by 3836293648
• complaining about 17mb in 2026 has to be virtue signaling of some sort...

  yes I know we went to the moon with a few kb but are we going to hang on to that for ever?

  by gfiorav
• ooh nice
  by dom96
• How does it compare to something like OrbStack?
  by oulipo2
• OrbStack has its own virtualization layer designed to simulate Docker. Containerization has different primitives even though it supports the same OCI images
  by LoganDark
• Any hosting requirements?
  by piosin
• can someone tldr me why choose apple container (and its ui) over docker (and orbstack)
  by armanj
• I can’t speak about orbstack, but I’ve worked with docker desktop and podman desktop for years on macOS. Those programs start up a virtual machine that consistently eats ram regardless of whether or not you are running containers in it. Apple container looks lighter weight. In the age of ridiculous ram costs, you gotta save resources.
  by samgranieri
• Looks neat, need to give it a spin
  by nf-x
• Looks great, does it also come with a menubar integration?
  by mrbnprck
• It does, doesn't it?
  by xinit
• Looks nice!

  Will give it a try, you won a star

  by Aejkatappaja
• Is this possibly a replacement for Orbstack?
  by sails
• I really want to use this but am stuck (right now) having to use Caddy's docker tags integration for name resolution.
  by nvahalik
• Can you not use Avahi in the guest and get zeroconf?

  Oh! Do you mean the issue is adding extra name resolution to a VM?

  Have you tried this avahi alias trick?

  https://gist.github.com/tomslominski/9d507acd4036952d65b2364...

  Works like a charm, bit odd that you have a persistent avahi client process broadcasting per alias, but it's lightweight.

  by dofm
• Very nice - would love to see the ability to open a Dockerfile directly in the UI to build/run it.
  by siquick
• Working on this..
  by xinit
• Shipped in 0.1.8; Images -> Build Image (context dir, tag, build args). It drives Apple's buildkit shim directly over vsock, no docker needed. brew upgrade davit or the in-app updater will get it.
  by xinit
• I will give this a try!

  Docker desktop on mac does not work well (uses lots of resources) and my current alternative is OrbStack (very slick, uses far less resources, but freemium).

  by david_p
• Docker desktop is a memory hog. What's the memory usage of Davit?
  by ballislife30
• With nothing running, the platform's background services idle at roughly 25 MB. Docker desktop starts a single VM to host all containers and will reserve memory to do so. Davit itself is about 25mb and then each container will use the memory up to what you allocate for it.
  by xinit
• Looks nice. Great work. FYI, the gist link 404s under “Can I reach a container by name from my Mac?”.
  by jon_adler
• Kinda interestingly: it zips to 17MB, but the binary looks to be 56MB (davit.app/contents/macos/davit). That seems like a surprising amount of compression for a binary - embedded assets maybe? Possibly this is normal for mac apps though?
  by Groxx
• A lot of Mac apps compress like this. Not so long ago, it was pretty common to download a 3-400mb dmg file that decompresses to a 1.5gb app package, for example.
  by Lalabadie
• Other recent vibe-coded projects providing similar interfaces:

  - https://github.com/tdeverx/contained-app

  - https://github.com/tofa84/berth

  by bbg2401
• Hmm… how does one even pick between multiple vibe coded options?

  I like to vet my options before committing to new software but who knows if the authors are gonna support these in a month? I don’t want to waste Fable tokens to fix bugs myself when they crop up.

  by roger_
• and https://github.com/andrew-waters/orchard but without vibe coding
  by bluejedi
• I don't know a lot about containers. Would containers created for/with this also work in Docker?

  Good name for this app, BTW.

  by MoonWalk
• Why would someone downvote this perfectly relevant question?

  Pathetic.

  by VerifiedReports
• It claims to be backed by (and require) apple/containers(1) which "consumes and produces OCI-compatible container images" so if all that is true .... yes!

  1) https://github.com/apple/container

  by natebc