I have also started swapping to colima due to docker-desktop reliability being pretty bad, and would love colima support.

In the meantime, you can run:

docker save myimage > image.tar
dive docker-engine://image.tar

@jhogendorn dive docker-engine://image.tar doesn't seem to work for me after saving an image to a tar:

docker save my-valid-image:latest > image.tar

dive docker-engine://image.tar
Image Source: docker://docker-engine://image.tar
Fetching image... (this can take a while for large images)
Handler not available locally. Trying to pull 'docker-engine://image.tar'...
invalid reference format
cannot fetch image
exit status 1

oh, apologies i mistyped.

dive docker-archive://image.tar

A simple fix for this right now is just running sudo ln -sf ~/.colima/docker.sock /var/run/docker.sock every time after colima start

A simple fix for this right now is just running sudo ln -sf ~/.colima/docker.sock /var/run/docker.sock every time after colima start

this works for me

If you setup the DOCKER_HOST environment variable to point to colima in your shell configuration, dive (and other docker tools) will work out of the box. No need to manually update a symbolic link.

1. Find the configuration file for your shell.
   • The default shell is Zsh on Macs. Your terminal configuration file is the ~/.zshrc file.
   • If you switched to Bash, your terminal configuration file is ~/.bashrc.
2. Add export DOCKER_HOST=unix://$HOME/.colima/docker.sock to the file.
3. Save and exit.
4. Start a new terminal or run source ~/.zshrc or source ~/.bashrc to apply the changes to the existing terminal session.

+1

According to colima FAQ what is missing in dive is support for Docker contexts (https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/blob/main/docs/FAQ.md#cannot-connect-to-the-docker-daemon-at-unixvarrundockersock-is-the-docker-daemon-running):
However, some applications are not aware of Docker contexts and may lead to the error.