Davit

Davit is a native macOS app that gives Apple's own container platform a real graphical interface, so you can run Linux containers on an Apple silicon Mac without Docker Desktop. Apple ships a container stack that treats Linux containers as lightweight virtual machines, and it's fast and well integrated, but it's driven from the command line. Davit puts a proper UI on top of it, close in spirit to OrbStack or Docker Desktop while staying entirely within Apple's stack.

The context matters here. Apple's container platform is relatively new, and while the command-line tools are solid, most people expect a desktop app to manage containers the way Docker Desktop or OrbStack does. Davit fills that gap without dragging in a second runtime. It doesn't replace Apple's containers with its own engine, it drives the one Apple already gives you, so what you see in the app and what you get on the command line stay in sync.

What makes it different from a typical desktop container app is how thin it is. Davit is built entirely in SwiftUI with no Electron, no web views, and no background agents. It talks straight to Apple's container daemon over XPC, the same protocol the command-line tool uses, instead of shelling out to the CLI or running a hidden service. The result feels like a Mac app rather than a browser bolted onto a tray icon, and it keeps memory and CPU use low even when it's sitting in the background.

The main screen is a dashboard that shows service status, resource usage, and live CPU charts, so you can tell at a glance whether the platform is healthy and what your containers are doing. From the container list you can start, stop, restart, delete, and recreate, with live monitoring of CPU, memory, and IP address per container. An Edit and Recreate flow lets you change ports, environment variables, and resource limits by standing up a fresh container from an existing config, which sidesteps the usual problem of tweaking a container you can't easily modify in place.

Beyond lifecycle control, Davit covers the everyday work of living with containers. You can open an interactive shell straight into Terminal or iTerm, and a built-in file browser lets you navigate, download, upload, and delete files inside a running container. Image handling includes pulling with progress tracking, tagging, deletion, and platform variants, with registry support for Docker Hub, ghcr.io, quay.io, and private registries behind authentication. There's volume and network management, and a configuration editor that exposes the platform's full settings with validation so you don't hand-edit files blindly.

For a lot of Mac developers the appeal is simple. Apple's container platform is fast and built on Apple's own virtualization, but staring at command output to check what's running gets old quickly. Davit gives that workflow a face, with the same actions available as buttons and a live view of what each container is doing, and it stays out of the way the rest of the time. It's the kind of tool you leave in the menu bar and forget about until you need it, then it's right there.

Small touches make it feel finished. A menu bar item gives you quick actions and service status from anywhere without opening the main window, and in-app updates check for new versions and install them with one click. Because the whole thing speaks directly to Apple's daemon, the state you see in Davit is the real state of the platform rather than a cached snapshot, which matters when you're switching between the app and the command line during a debugging session.

It's aimed at developers on Apple silicon who already lean on containers and would rather not run Docker Desktop, whether for licensing reasons, resource overhead, or a preference for staying native. You'll want an Apple silicon Mac on macOS 15 or later, with macOS 26 recommended, and Apple's container platform installed. Davit can install that platform for you if it's missing, and it does so without asking for an admin password, which lowers the barrier to a first run considerably.

Davit is free and open source under the MIT license, with the full source on GitHub. You can install it in one line through Homebrew with brew install wouterdebie/tap/davit, or grab a signed release from the project's GitHub page. Because it's a thin native client over Apple's own daemon, it lives or dies with that platform, which means it only runs on recent Apple silicon Macs and won't help on Intel machines or other operating systems. If your world is already Apple silicon and Apple's containers, that focus is the point rather than a limitation.