Show HN: Davit, a Apple Containers UI
131 points
4 hours ago
| 14 comments
| davit.app
| HN
Mostly vibe-coded Apple Containers front-end that I'd like to use myself. But if others want to use it, here's the source code.
dllrr
20 minutes ago
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I've been a fan of Orbstack for make 2 years or so. Worth the cost for me because it's so well integrated and fast and docker command compatible.

I'll give this a try though.

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ttul
18 minutes ago
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I’m guessing the OrbStack team will probably support MacOS native containers soon enough, with all their management goodness on top.
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simonw
2 hours ago
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This looks like a really solid app. I like that it's 17 MB and uses the ContainerAPIClient library directly.

28 commits in 3 days, 5,015 lines of Swift, every commit "Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5".

Also neat that it's signed/notarized. I installed it and it downloaded the necessary container platform stuff on first launch.

Suggestion: add a getting started tutorial to the site which suggests an image to try out and has screenshots (or a silent video) showing you how to get that image up and running and what you can do with it.

The create image dialog suggests "nginx:latest" but that's not a great starting demo.

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thefourthchime
52 minutes ago
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The AI-Maxing copy on the website kind of gave it away. Doesn't mean is not a great app though!
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xinit
28 minutes ago
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Great suggestion. Coming up.
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lelandfe
34 minutes ago
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Unrelated. I noticed that the settings window (Cmd-,) text inputs all type from the right instead of the left like older macOS inputs (or web inputs[0])

Is that a thing macOS is moving to? I'm sure I've seen Apple use these too.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

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david_p
58 minutes ago
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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).

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internet2000
1 hour ago
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Really nice. Worked perfectly downloading the runtime and running nginx:latest.

It's getting to the point that scrolling down on Github and seeing Claude as a contributor is a signal the app will be good (Native feeling, no Electron, etc)

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ballislife30
2 hours ago
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Docker desktop is a memory hog. What's the memory usage of Davit?
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xinit
36 minutes ago
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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.
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MoonWalk
55 minutes ago
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I don't know a lot about containers. Would containers created for/with this also work in Docker?

Good name for this app, BTW.

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natebc
43 minutes ago
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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

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neodymiumphish
1 hour ago
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contained-app includes a Files feature to allow in-container filesystem browsing. Is there any plan to implement this in Davit as well?

Looks like great work, will try it soon!

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xinit
35 minutes ago
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Great suggestion! I'll add this!
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nvahalik
2 hours ago
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I really want to use this but am stuck (right now) having to use Caddy's docker tags integration for name resolution.
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dofm
2 hours ago
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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.

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nvahalik
1 hour ago
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Interesting! I will look into this.
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bbg2401
3 hours ago
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Other recent vibe-coded projects providing similar interfaces:

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

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

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mrbnprck
2 hours ago
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Looks great, does it also come with a menubar integration?
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xinit
1 hour ago
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It does, doesn't it?
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nf-x
2 hours ago
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Looks neat, need to give it a spin
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dom96
1 hour ago
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ooh nice
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oulipo2
2 hours ago
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How does it compare to something like OrbStack?
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LoganDark
2 hours ago
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OrbStack has its own virtualization layer designed to simulate Docker. Containerization has different primitives even though it supports the same OCI images
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oulipo2
1 hour ago
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Okay, so it allows to run the same image, but is not CLI-compatible with docker that's what you mean? But is it more / less / equivalently efficient ?
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xinit
33 minutes ago
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Docker Desktop/Obstack start a single VM that runs all your containers. This means that you'll have to scale it accordingly. Davit uses Apple Containers that runs a very thin VM for each container you spin up. Depending on your use case it's more, less or equivalently effcient.
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