Install a working container runtime

In the past the recommended runtime would for sure be Docker Desktop . But since Docker Inc. changed their license model it is fair enough for an open source project to look for free alternatives.

Linux

The obvious (and our recommended) “alternative” to Docker Desktop on Linux is to just use the Docker Engine (without Docker Desktop), a pure CLI-based solution available for most popular Linux distributions licensed under the Apache License, version 2.0. Installation instructions can be found here .

MacOS

Since the Docker Engine is not working out of the box on MacOS, a virtualizations tool which helps emulating linux is needed. Fortunately there are several solutions on the market. Good results could be achieved using Colima .

Setup Colima

Please uninstall or at least quit Docker Desktop if you already used it, before starting the setup.

For Colima to work properly you need Colima itself and a container client e.g. the Docker client, which is still free to use:

    brew install colima
    brew install docker

After the installation you need to start the runtime:

    colima start --cpu x --memory y

For M1 Macs it might be necessary to add --arch aarch64

Docker Desktop uses 5 cores and 12 GB of RAM by default on an M1 MacBook Pro. The equivalent in Colima can be achieved with

    colima start --cpu 5 --memory 12

That’s all you have to do. After these few steps you can go on with the devcontainer setup.

Microsoft Windows

There is currently no recommended alternative for Windows except using GitHub codespaces, a cloud-based development environment.

An option would be to setup a VM (e.g. with VirtualBox or VMWare) running a Linux system with Docker Engine (see above).

Other alternatives

Besides our recommendations above, there are further alternatives, which are not yet evaluated by this project or have some other drawbacks, blocking a recommendation.

For example, you could try Podman / Buildah , which can replace docker run and docker build, respectively. Podman is available for MacOS, Windows, and several Linux distributions. Buildah seems just being available for several Linux distributions.