Davit: a free, native SwiftUI front-end for Apple's container platform

Davit is an open-source (MIT) macOS app that puts a native graphical interface on Apple’s own container engine, letting developers run Linux OCI containers on Apple silicon without Docker Desktop. Rather than shipping its own virtualization layer, it links Apple’s client library and speaks XPC directly to the container daemon — the same path the official CLI uses — so there are no socket shims, Electron shells, or background agents of its own. The app is a roughly 17 MB SwiftUI binary, Developer ID–signed and notarized, and requires an Apple silicon Mac on macOS 15 or later. If the underlying platform isn’t installed, Davit can download and set up Apple’s signed package in the user’s Library without an admin password.

Functionally it covers the everyday container workflow: starting, stopping, and deleting containers with live CPU, memory, and IP per row; streaming logs; live stat charts; interactive shells opened straight into Terminal or iTerm; image pulling with progress; and volume and subnet management. Because Apple’s containers are immutable, Davit leans on an ‘edit and recreate’ pattern — prefilling a new container from an existing one so ports, env vars, mounts, or resources can be changed quickly. Settings such as default CPU/memory, registry, and DNS are written out as validated TOML overrides.

The pitch against Docker Desktop is architectural: Apple’s platform boots a separate lightweight VM per container via the Virtualization framework and tears it down on stop, so idle overhead sits around 25 MB instead of a persistent multi-gigabyte VM. Against OrbStack, the author positions Davit as the free, Apple-native option — a UI over Apple’s engine rather than a third-party Docker-compatible stack — while conceding OrbStack remains the more mature drop-in Docker replacement today. Built-in container name resolution is still on the roadmap, with mDNS/Avahi suggested as a stopgap.