Start colima on different disk

[santilococo]

Hello. I want to know if it is possible to start colima on an external disk. Something like colima start --disk /Volumes/X. That is because I want to download the docker's images on an external drive. Thanks!

[abiosoft]

That is not yet supported. The ability to specify custom directory for Colima is planned.

[anarchy89]

@abiosoft ahh damn, are there plans for a fix to that as well?

[abiosoft]

You can modify the colima mounts to point to your external volume and that should work. But having a symlink in your $HOME that points to the external drive would not work in the VM.

[anarchy89]

so basically i need to put the full path to the external drive whenever i docker containers. Also, if I used brew to install colima on my macbook, the binary gets put in /opt/homebrew, are the .colima and .lima files that need to be moved still in my home directory ~/ ?

[abiosoft]

You need to modify colima mounts to include the external drives via the --mount flag or mounts config. The defaults are $HOME and /tmp/colima.

Nothing actually changes when you use Docker containers i.e. same docker commands.

However, if you were to symlink the external drive to somewhere in $HOME, a symlink is basically a pointer to another location, and the location would not exist in the colima VM, unless it is mounted as well.

So if you have your external drive in /Volumes/myDrive, you need to include that in the colima mounts. e.g.

colima start --mount $HOME:w --mount /Volumes/myDrive:w

[klodeckl]

What about mutagen when using mounts to external drives?

[dan-corneanu]

I have the same problem too.
I have 3 colima instances that, combined, eat up something like 40G of drive. It would be nice to be able to specify the folder where to store the VM files for each colima instance.