Show HN: Davit, a Apple Containers UI(davit.app)
142 pointsby xinit5 hours ago16 comments
  • simonw3 hours ago
    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.

    • thefourthchimean hour ago
      The AI-Maxing copy on the website kind of gave it away. Doesn't mean is not a great app though!
    • xinitan hour ago
      Great suggestion. Coming up.
  • dllrr44 minutes ago
    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.

    • ttul43 minutes ago
      I’m guessing the OrbStack team will probably support MacOS native containers soon enough, with all their management goodness on top.
  • 38362936487 minutes ago
    > Tiny. A single ~17 MB app

    Oh goodness what have we come to? I know we're comparing to electron monstrosities, but still

    • gfiorav3 minutes ago
      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?

  • lelandfean hour ago
    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/...

  • internet20002 hours ago
    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)

  • ozarkerD24 minutes ago
    Man I wish Apple would add docker api compatibility to Apple containers
  • david_pan hour ago
    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).

  • ballislife303 hours ago
    Docker desktop is a memory hog. What's the memory usage of Davit?
    • xinitan hour ago
      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.
  • nvahalik3 hours ago
    I really want to use this but am stuck (right now) having to use Caddy's docker tags integration for name resolution.
    • dofm3 hours ago
      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.

      • nvahalik2 hours ago
        Interesting! I will look into this.
  • neodymiumphish2 hours ago
    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!

    • xinitan hour ago
      Great suggestion! I'll add this!
  • bbg24014 hours ago
    Other recent vibe-coded projects providing similar interfaces:

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

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

    • roger_22 minutes ago
      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.

  • MoonWalkan hour ago
    I don't know a lot about containers. Would containers created for/with this also work in Docker?

    Good name for this app, BTW.

    • natebcan hour ago
      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

  • mrbnprck3 hours ago
    Looks great, does it also come with a menubar integration?
    • xinit2 hours ago
      It does, doesn't it?
  • nf-x3 hours ago
    Looks neat, need to give it a spin
  • dom96an hour ago
    ooh nice
  • oulipo23 hours ago
    How does it compare to something like OrbStack?
    • LoganDark3 hours ago
      OrbStack has its own virtualization layer designed to simulate Docker. Containerization has different primitives even though it supports the same OCI images
      • oulipo22 hours ago
        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 ?
        • xinitan hour ago
          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.