Installing 'docker compose' plug-in or stand-alone on 'Mac apple silicon' without 'docker desktop'

Question

I am trying to install 'docker compose' plugin on 'Mac apple silicon' machine. My org doesn't allow 'Docker Desktop' so we use 'colima' instead. There is no official documentation to install the 'compose' plugin on mac without 'docker desktop'.

The links and instrutions for 'Compose Apple Binary' that that I have extracted on various blogs and 'chat gpt' are giving 404.

Please help in installing the 'docker compose' plugin or standalone on 'Mac apple silicon' without 'docker desktop'

Answer 1

Here's how you do it.

If you can use Homebrew, do

brew install docker-compose

and pay heed to the notes after the installer runs. They tell you to add

 "cliPluginsExtraDirs": [
     "/opt/homebrew/lib/docker/cli-plugins"
 ]

to your ~/.docker/config.json file.

I don't know if Homebrew also installs Credentials Helper with Compose, so you might have to do:

brew install docker-credential-helper

If you can't use Homebrew, I think you'll have to do the following.

Install Credentials Helper using Docker's instructions here.

Go into ~/.docker/config.json and make sure the value for credsStore is osxkeychain. My file looks like:

{
    "auths": {},
    "credsStore": "osxkeychain",
    "currentContext": "colima",
    "plugins": {
        "debug": {
            "hooks": "exec"
        },
        "scout": {
            "hooks": "pull,buildx build"
        }
    },
    "features": {
        "hooks": "true"
    }
}

Download latest Docker Compose from here for your architecture (aarch64 for Apple Silicon): https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/latest

Copy the executable to /usr/local/bin, naming it docker-compose.

From there, make sure it's executable:

sudo chmod +x docker-compose

Clear Apple's scareware:

sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine docker-compose

As in the Homebrew case, add

 "cliPluginsExtraDirs": [
     "/opt/homebrew/lib/docker/cli-plugins"
 ]

to your ~/.docker/config.json file.

Open a new terminal session and try

docker compose version

If that doesn't work, try

docker-compose version

If that works, the cliPluginsExtraDirs entry in the config.json file isn't working.