# Davit: A Native UI for Apple's Container Tool

> Posted: 2026-06-15 · Updated: 2026-06-15 · Tags: macos, containers, apple, swiftui
>
> Davit is a native SwiftUI front end for Apple's container platform. It talks to the platform over XPC instead of shelling out to the CLI, and it also runs headless.


I've spent the last week living in [Apple's container tool]({{< ref "2026-06-12_MacOS-Container-Tool" >}}) from the terminal. It's good. But some days I want a window, a list of what's running, and a button. [Davit](https://github.com/wouterdebie/davit) is that window.

![Davit's dashboard showing container services stopped, with a sidebar for Containers, Images, Volumes, Networks, and Machines](davit-dashboard.png "Davit's dashboard — container services stopped")

It's a native SwiftUI app. No Electron, no web view stuffed in a title bar. That alone put it ahead of most of the desktop container tooling I've tried.

The part I like: it doesn't shell out to the `container` binary and scrape the output. **It talks to the same platform the CLI does, straight over XPC.** So the dashboard, the live CPU chart, the container list, the log tail, the filesystem browser all read from the source instead of parsing text a human was supposed to read.

The screenshot above is the first thing I saw, and it made me laugh. "Container services stopped," with a Start button. That's the `container system start` dance from my last post, except now it's a button I don't have to remember.

Install is a one-liner:

```console
brew install wouterdebie/tap/davit
```

If you don't already have Apple's container platform, Davit can install it for you.

It's not GUI-only, either. The same binary does `davit run`, `davit build`, and a full `davit compose up`/`down`/`logs`/`exec` with docker-compatible flags. So I can click around when I want to look, and drop to the same tool in a script when I don't.

Apple silicon, and you'll want the container platform on the box. It's young, and it's MIT. Worth a look.


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Source: https://houdeshell.dev/post/2026-06-15_davit-native-container-ui/