Dev adventures, epic bugs, tiny wins, and the occasional meltdown. Zola 2026-08-02T00:00:00+00:00 https://golden-fox.dev/tags/orbstack/atom.xml 2026-08-02T00:00:00+00:00 2026-08-02T00:00:00+00:00 Aakriti Agarwal https://golden-fox.dev/til/orbstack/ <p>I recently tried to run <a rel="external" href="https://github.com/roostorg/coop">Coop</a>, ROOST’s open source content moderation platform locally because I wanted to do open source contribution.</p> <p>The problem was that Coop needs Postgres, ClickHouse and Redis running in a containers and my M1 MacBook only has 8GB of RAM and with Firefox, Zen, terminal and a Node server already running, Docker Desktop was making things a bit painful.</p> <p>So I ended up trying <a rel="external" href="https://orbstack.dev">OrbStack</a> and was honestly surprised by how much lighter it felt.</p> <p>OrbStack is basically an alternative to Docker Desktop for Mac. It still uses the normal <code>docker</code> commands and Docker Compose so I didnt have to change anything in Coop’s setup.</p> <p>One of the things I actually learned was that containers need a Linux kernel, and macOS doesn’t have one. So Docker on a Mac always runs a small hidden Linux virtual machine and puts your containers inside it. Docker Desktop and OrbStack are both doing that, OrbStack’s VM is just much lighter.</p> <p>For me, the main difference was memory. Coop’s database containers were using around 450MB while idle which made a pretty big difference on an 8GB machine.</p> <p>There is one annoying thing to know about though orbStack uses its own docker context so if your containers randomly disappear, its worth checking:</p> <pre class="giallo" style="color-scheme: light dark; color: light-dark(#657B83, #839496); background-color: light-dark(#FDF6E3, #002B36);"><code data-lang="shellscript"><span class="giallo-l"><span style="color: light-dark(#268BD2, #268BD2);">docker</span><span style="color: light-dark(#2AA198, #2AA198);"> context</span><span style="color: light-dark(#2AA198, #2AA198);"> ls</span></span> <span class="giallo-l"><span style="color: light-dark(#268BD2, #268BD2);">docker</span><span style="color: light-dark(#2AA198, #2AA198);"> context</span><span style="color: light-dark(#2AA198, #2AA198);"> use</span><span style="color: light-dark(#2AA198, #2AA198);"> orbstack</span></span></code></pre> <p>Nothing groundbreaking but I was pretty happy to find something that made running Coop locally actually manageable on my laptop.</p> <p><strong>TIL:</strong> If you are on a Mac with limited RAM and need to run Docker locally, OrbStack is definitely worth trying.</p>