Colima is a project that is easy to use and fully open source, and it helps in running docker containers on Linux OS and MacOs machines.

We know Docker Desktop is no more a complete open source, if you are not using it personally. So now Colima is a tool which does work similar to Docker Desktop and In this article we are going to see how it works alone or along with Docker Desktop on your Linux machines or MacOs machines for Drupal Development.

For Developers technical layman terms, Colima is more like Lima, where Lima does run Linux Virtual machines on MacOs, where Colima does run Docker Containers on MacOs machines.

Let’s see how to install Colima?

• I suggest you Stop the Docker Desktop and Stop the Lando (In my case i’m using it). If you are using any others like ddev etc, Stop them as well.
• Next, use brew to install Colima (assuming Docker is already running on your machine).

brew install colima

• Start the Colima with the below command. –cpu and –memory are only needed for the first time or one time only while you start colima.

colima start — cpu 4 — memory 4

It’s kind of pretty simple to install and use it.

You can have both Docker Desktop and Colima on your machines (although open source people prefer to have open source software, like Colima).

Only cautious things to remember is to stop similar services or dependent services on docker before you start Colima. Let’s see in detail.

So, technically you can run both Colima and Docker Desktop, with a couple of cautions.

• Stop Docker Desktop while Colima is running.
• Before Switching from Colima to Docker Desktop or vice versa, make sure to stop the dependent services, in my case I used to Stop Lando. You need to stop if you are running any other services like ddev.

Once you have your containers running with the help of Colima, you can continue with your Drupal Development with Lando or similar tools like ddev etc.

Thanks for reading the article, for more drupal related articles read our peoples blog articles.