How to manage multiple colima profiles

[paulodiovani]

I might be misunderstanding how to use colima with multiple concurrent profiles, but I didn't find any reference on the docs on how to do it right.

Use case: docker + kubernetes profiles

# start colima with default docker engine
colima start

# start a second profile with kubernetes engine
colima start -p kube --kubernetes

# check instances
colima list

PROFILE    STATUS     ARCH       CPUS    MEMORY    DISK      RUNTIME       ADDRESS
default    Running    aarch64    8       12GiB     100GiB    docker
kube       Running    aarch64    8       12GiB     100GiB    docker+k3s

This works as expected so far. We can use docker and kubeclt, which is set to the colima-kube context automatically.
Problems arise when I want to stand down the kubernetes instance to save resources with I'm done working with it.

colima stop kube

PROFILE    STATUS     ARCH       CPUS    MEMORY    DISK      RUNTIME    ADDRESS
default    Running    aarch64    8       12GiB     100GiB    docker
kube       Stopped    aarch64    8       12GiB     100GiB

This successful stops the kube instance, but also kills the docker socket:

docker ps

failed to connect to the docker API at unix:///var/run/docker.sock; check if the path is correct and if the daemon is running: dial unix /var/run/docker.sock: connect: no such file or directory

Expected behavior

• Allow to use docker with the default instance, even when a second kubernetes instance is running
• Default docker commands to first docker runtime instance, if it exists

Current behavior

• When killing and instance (maybe only the last one created), docker command stops working
• Workaround: Restart with colima restart seems to update docker socket

Additional information

• It looks like the docker images and containers are shared across instances, this is not what I expected, I thought they would be isolated, but it is not an issue for me now

[abiosoft]

Containers and images are not shared across instances.

If you only want Kubernetes without interacting with the Docker within the instance, you can use the Containerd runtime instead, to avoid the clash with the other Docker instance(s).

Regardless, you can always switch active docker context.

# the default instance
docker context use colima

# other instances have the 'colima' prefix for the context name.
docker context use colilma-kube

[paulodiovani]

Thanks for the answer.

I have never used the docker context command before and it should solve the issue.
I'll try the containerd alternative too.