First, make sure your Homebrew formulas are all up to date:

brew update

Install Colima along with the Docker and Kubernetes command-line tools:

brew install colima docker kubectl

If you work on a network controlled by an organisation that uses TLS stripping security appliances you’ll probably need to install additional CA root certificates before you can pull container images from the Internet, etc. You can put them in the usual place in your home directory and Colima will automatically install them in the VMs it starts:

mkdir -p ~/.docker/certs.d
cd ~/.docker/certs.d
curl -o proxy-cert.crt https://insecurity.my.corp/proxy-cert.crt

(Do make sure you put each certificate in a separate file; if they are concatenated you’ll need to split them.)

With Colima installed, you should be able to start a Colima instance. There are a handful of options to control the CPU, disk, and memory allocation for the VM, the runtimes to configure on it, etc.

colima start --memory 8 --kubernetes

Check that the Docker and Kubernetes command-line tools have been configured to talk to the new Colima instance:

kubectl get pods -A
docker ps

If you installed custom certs, you’d better check that it’s all working correctly by pulling an image:

docker pull python:3.12-slim

Easy.