Folks, I have a node.js script running on my Windows machine that uses the dockerode npm package to talk to docker on said box and starts and kills docker containers.
However, after the containers have been killed off, docker still holds on to the memory that it blocked for those containers and this means downstream processes fail due to lack of RAM.
To counter this, I have powershell scripts to start docker desktop and to kill docker desktop.
All of this is a horrid experience.
On my Mac, I just use Colima with Portainer and couldn’t be happier.
I’ve explored some options to replace Docker Desktop and it seems Rancher Desktop is a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop, including the docker remote API.
- Is this true? Is Rancher Desktop that good of a drop-in replacement?
- Does Rancher Desktop better manage RAM for containers that have been killed off? Or does it do the same thing as Docker Desktop and hold on to the RAM?
Are there other options which I’m not thinking of which might solve my problems? I’ve seen a few alternatives but haven’t tried them yet -
moby,
containerd,
podman
I don’t actually need the Docker Desktop interface. So pure CLI docker would also just work. How are you all running pure docker on Windows boxes?
If you don’t need UI, I prefer Podman. Rancher Desktop is good though.
Podman Desktop is also a thing
thanks! So podman supports the docker API completely?
Drop-in replacement as far as I can tell after using it for some time
This is a common misconception. Podman has similar commands to Docker CLI but it’s not a “drop-in replacement”. Depending on your usage, you might run into things that don’t work the same.
Interesting, thanks!
Yep! You can even just alias the docker command to podman, and most things will work just fine. Podman can also expose a socket that is compatible with the Docker API for anything that requires it too.
When I had a look on it a while ago they didn’t support Docker Compose. But except this it’s a drop in replacement.
There’s now https://github.com/containers/podman-compose which seems to work okay, haven’t tested heavily though
Yes, rancher desktop works perfectly 👍🏻