Davit: A Native macOS UI for Apple's Container Platform

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🛠️ Davit

What it isA native SwiftUI GUI for Apple’s open-source container platform
PlatformmacOS 15+ (Apple silicon)
PriceFree & open source (MIT)
Linkdavit.app / GitHub

I have been looking for a Docker Desktop replacement that does not require a perpetual Linux VM, a license key, or an Electron process eating 400 MB at idle. Davit is the closest I have found to that ideal. It talks directly to Apple’s own container daemon over XPC, the same wire path the CLI uses. No socket shims, no background agents, no accounts.

  1. The architecture is the story. Apple’s container platform boots a separate lightweight VM per container via the Virtualization framework, sized to that container, and tears it down when the container stops. With nothing running, the platform idles at roughly 25 MB. Davit itself is a native SwiftUI app, so its footprint is mostly shared macOS framework memory. Compare that to Docker Desktop, which keeps a multi-gigabyte Linux VM alive whether you have containers or not.

  2. It handles the full lifecycle. Start, stop, restart, delete containers with live CPU, memory, and IP on every row. Streaming logs with follow and boot mode. Live stat charts. Raw config inspection. One-click terminal into any running container, straight into Terminal or iTerm over the native API. Browse any running container’s filesystem right in the app, download files to your Mac, upload or delete. No docker cp incantations needed.

  3. The Edit & Recreate flow is clever. Containers are immutable, so Davit prefills a new one from the old config with the image’s entrypoint and env subtracted. You change ports, env vars, mounts, or resources in seconds without starting from scratch.

  4. It manages images, volumes, and networks too. Pull with live progress, run from any image, tag, prune. Create sized volumes and custom subnets. See what is in use before you delete it. Registry logins for Docker Hub, ghcr.io, quay.io, or any OCI registry. Credentials are verified on the spot and stored in your login keychain, shared with the container CLI.

  5. The honest limitation: this is Apple’s container platform, not Docker. It runs standard OCI images and pulls from all the same registries, but it does not give you a Docker-compatible socket. Tools like docker-compose will not work out of the box. If you need broad Docker tooling compatibility, OrbStack is the more mature choice today. Davit is for people who want Apple’s native stack with a clean GUI and do not need the Docker API shim.

  6. First-run experience is excellent. No container platform installed? Davit downloads Apple’s signed installer, verifies it, and sets everything up in your user Library. No administrator rights needed. It can add the container CLI to your shell from Settings. From a fresh install to a running nginx container serving localhost:8088 takes about two minutes.

Install & first run 

brew install wouterdebie/tap/davit

Or download from GitHub Releases. On first launch, Davit sets up Apple’s container platform for you if it is not already installed.

# Pull a demo image and run it
# Click Images -> Pull Image, enter: nginxdemos/hello
# Click Run, set port mapping host 8088 -> container 80
# Open http://localhost:8088 in your browser

The app is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens without Gatekeeper warnings.

Worth your time if: you are on Apple silicon, want to run containers without Docker Desktop’s overhead, and do not need Docker API compatibility. If you need docker-compose and the full Docker ecosystem, stick with OrbStack or Docker Desktop.

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