Davit — a native macOS UI for Apple containers

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💡 **What You’ll Learn**:




Davit — a native macOS UI for Apple containers



Davit app icon

A fully native macOS app for Apple’s container platform — run Linux containers on Apple silicon, no Docker Desktop required.

Free & open source · MIT licensed · Signed & notarized

Requires an Apple silicon Mac running macOS 15 or later.
Or via Homebrew: brew install wouterdebie/tap/davit

Davit dashboard showing service status, resource counts, disk usage and a live CPU chart
The dashboard: services, disk usage and live CPU across all running containers.

Everything you’d expect. Nothing you don’t.

Davit talks directly to Apple’s open-source container daemon over XPC — the same wire path the CLI uses. No Electron, no web views, no background agents of its own.

📦

Containers

Start, stop, restart and delete with live CPU, memory and IP on every row. Streaming logs with follow & boot mode, live stat charts, and raw config inspection.

🖥️

One-click terminal

Open an interactive shell in any running container, straight into Terminal or iTerm — over the native API, no CLI needed.

🪄

Edit & Recreate

Containers are immutable — so Davit prefills a new one from the old config with the image’s entrypoint and env subtracted, letting you change ports, env vars, mounts or resources in seconds.

💿

Images, volumes, networks

Pull with live progress, run from any image, tag, prune. Create sized volumes and custom subnets. See what’s in use before you delete it.

⚙️

Platform settings, editable

Default CPU/memory for new containers, registry, DNS, builder resources — edited in the app, validated by the platform’s own config loader, saved as clean TOML overrides.

⬇️

Installs the platform for you

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, too.

Native, down to the pixels.

Built entirely in SwiftUI. Menu bar quick actions, a Dock icon only when you want one, and live charts that don’t spin up a browser to render.

Container list with live per-container CPU, memory and IP
Containers with live stats and port badges.
Live CPU and memory charts for a container
Per-container CPU & memory, sampled every 2 seconds.
Container detail overview with network, ports, mounts and environment
Network, ports, mounts and environment at a glance.
Image list with platform variants, sizes and in-use badges
Images with sizes, platforms and in-use badges.

How is this different from Docker Desktop?

  • It’s Apple’s engine. Each container runs in its own lightweight VM via Apple’s Virtualization framework — sub-second boots, per-container IP addresses, optimized for Apple silicon.
  • OCI all the way. Pulls from Docker Hub, ghcr.io, quay.io or any registry. Your existing images just work.
  • Nothing between you and the daemon. Davit links Apple’s own client library and speaks XPC directly — no socket shims, no license agreements, no accounts.
  • Tiny. A single ~17 MB app.

💬 **What’s your take?**
Share your thoughts in the comments below!

#️⃣ **#Davit #native #macOS #Apple #containers**

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