Show HN: Davit, a Apple Containers UI
davit.appMostly 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.
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.
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.
The AI-Maxing copy on the website kind of gave it away. Doesn't mean is not a great app though!
I think we're past the point where agentic coding is a given now.
Great suggestion. Coming up.
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.
I’m guessing the OrbStack team will probably support MacOS native containers soon enough, with all their management goodness on top.
Very nice - would love to see the ability to open a Dockerfile directly in the UI to build/run it.
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?
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.
A lot of the time that happened, when I checked it was because a lot of the assets were relatively uncompressed, so DMG-compression shrank them considerably. I haven't noticed the binaries themselves being this compressible.
But that's just "noticed", I definitely haven't paid much attention. And don't have a mac nowadays, so I can't go check my hard drive now.
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/...
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)
Man I wish Apple would add docker api compatibility to Apple containers
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).
Any hosting requirements?
Docker desktop is a memory hog. What's the memory usage of Davit?
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.
Other recent vibe-coded projects providing similar interfaces:
- https://github.com/tdeverx/contained-app
- https://github.com/tofa84/berth
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.
Ask fable to explore each project and pick the best one lmao
Vibes all the way down
Funny!
I really want to use this but am stuck (right now) having to use Caddy's docker tags integration for name resolution.
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.
Interesting! I will look into this.
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!
Great suggestion! I'll add this!
I don't know a lot about containers. Would containers created for/with this also work in Docker?
Good name for this app, BTW.
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
Looks great, does it also come with a menubar integration?
It does, doesn't it?
can someone tldr me why choose apple container (and its ui) over docker (and orbstack)
Looks neat, need to give it a spin
ooh nice
How does it compare to something like OrbStack?
OrbStack has its own virtualization layer designed to simulate Docker. Containerization has different primitives even though it supports the same OCI images
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 ?
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.
> Tiny. A single ~17 MB app
Oh goodness what have we come to? I know we're comparing to electron monstrosities, but still
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?