Davit - Native macOS UI for Apple Containers
Show HN: Davit, a Apple Containers UI
Davit is a fully native macOS application designed to manage Apple's container platform directly on Apple silicon, eliminating the need for Docker Desktop. Built entirely in SwiftUI, it offers a lightweight, efficient interface to start, stop, and monitor Linux containers with live CPU and memory charts. Users can access interactive terminals, edit immutable container configurations, and manage images and volumes without administrator rights. By communicating directly with Apple's container daemon over XPC, Davit provides a seamless, secure, and open-source experience optimized for modern Macs.
Everything you'd expect. Nothing you don't.
- _doctor_love
My current power move in the age of AI: do nothing.
I had an idea like this and thought I could vibe code it, but then I figured someone else would care more and do it first. I was right!
This looks like a great app and I'm excited to try it out.
Free idea: I would like to be able to "jail" an agent inside a VM and send instructions to the harness from outside the VM to agent(s) installed inside. Ideally there is no Codex/Claude/etc. installed on the host.
More awesome: let me provision multiple user accounts inside the VM and restrict filesystem / network policy by user. Then I can have a dev agent, QA agent, etc. each with its own view of the work. That would be a powerful base layer for further automation.
Of course I should be able to provision various resources "attached" to the VM that agents can use on a permissioned basis; e.g., DB, queue, external volume, and so forth.
- simonw
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.
- joohwan
What stood out to me more than this particular project is the visible acceleration of a phenomenon many of us could foresee, especially over the last year or so: people can build a version of the same idea faster than ever.
After like 10 minutes of searching I found multiple similar swift projects (most of them are just a couple of weeks or months old):
https://github.com/tdeverx/contained-app
https://github.com/nico81/iContainer
https://github.com/wouterdebie/davit
https://github.com/Augani/dory
https://github.com/tofa84/berth
https://github.com/erdaltoprak/ContainerUtility
https://github.com/andrew-waters/orchard
There were more if you include ones with fewer GitHub stars, CLI-only, non-Swift etc. but you get the idea.
People will increasingly be able to build their own version of the software they want. As that happens the value of someone else's decreases. The era of hyper-personal software is coming.
- bbg2401
Other recent vibe-coded projects providing similar interfaces:
- kylemclaren
Ha! Looks like we built the same thing: https://container-ui.fly.dev/
Now I wish I hadn't burned all those tokens!
- dllrr
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.
- internet2000
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)
- ozarkerD
Man I wish Apple would add docker api compatibility to Apple containers