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Docker Desktop Alternatives

The Antrea build system relies on Docker to build container images, which can then be used to test Antrea locally. As an Antrea developer, if you run make, docker build will be invoked to build the antrea-ubuntu container image. On Linux, Docker Engine (based on moby) runs natively, but if you use macOS or Windows for Antrea development, Docker needs to run inside a Linux Virtual Machine (VM). This VM is typically managed by Docker Desktop. Starting January 31 2022, Docker Desktop requires a per user paid subscription for professional use in “large” companies (more than 250 employees or more than $10 million in annual revenue). See https://www.docker.com/pricing/faq for details. For developers who contribute to Antrea as an employee of such a company (and not in their own individual capacity), it is no longer possible to use Docker Desktop to build (and possibly run) Antrea Docker images locally, unless they have a Docker subscription.

For contributors who do not have a Docker subscription, we recommend the following Docker Desktop alternatives.

Colima (macOS)

Colima is a UI built with Lima. It supports running a container runtime (docker, containerd or kubernetes) on macOS, inside a Lima VM. Major benefits of Colima include its ability to be used as a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop and its ability to coexist with Docker Desktop on the same macOS machine.

To install and run Colima, follow these steps:

brew install colima
colima start to start Colima (the Linux VM) with the default configuration. Check the Colima documentation for configuration options. By default, Colima will use the Docker runtime. This means that you can keep using the docker CLI and that no changes are required to build Antrea.
- we recommend increasing the CPU and memory resources allocated to the VM as by default it only has 2 vCPUs and 2GiB of memory. For example, you can use: colima start --cpu 4 --memory 8. Otherwise, building Antrea container images may be slow, and your Kind clusters may run out of memory.
docker context list and check that the colima context is selected. You can use docker context use desktop-linux to go back to Docker Desktop.
make to build Antrea locally. Check that the antrea-ubuntu image is available by listing all images with docker images.

We have validated that Kind clusters with Antrea can run inside Colima without any issue (confirmed for IPv4, IPv6 single-stack clusters, as well as for dual-stack clusters).

At any time, you can stop the VM with colima stop and restart it with colima start (you do not need to specify configuration flags again, unless you want to change the current values). You can also check the status of the VM with colima ls.

While it should be possible to have multiple Colima instances simultaneously, this is not something that we have tested.

Rancher Desktop (macOS and Windows)

Rancher Desktop is another possible alternative to Docker Desktop, which supports Windows in addition to macOS. On macOS, it also uses Lima as the Linux VM. Two major differences with Colima are that Rancher Desktop will always run Kubernetes, and that Rancher Desktop uses the nerdctl UI for container management instead of docker. However, the nerdctl and docker UIs are supposed to be compatible, so in theory it should be possible to alias docker to nerdctl and keep using the Antrea build system as is (to be tested).