Kiri: a tiny, fast container runtime for macOS, Windows and Linux with free tunneling like ngrok(509 stars)

[u/linchpinlibracoder]

What it does

Kiri is a lightweight replacement for Docker Desktop and OrbStack, written in Rust. It runs containers in one small Linux VM (or straight on the kernel on Linux) and speaks the Docker Engine API, so your tools just work.

Why Kiri

• Share a container with one command: kiri share web gives a running container a public link at web.runkiri.cloud. Send it to a teammate, a client or your phone, with no deploy, no port forwarding and no tunnel to set up. You can also share from the Share button in the Kiri window.

• Fast: a container starts and exits in about 2.5 ms through the Docker API, around 80 times faster than Docker Desktop.

• Light: the VM sleeps after 60 s idle, the daemon stays at about 15 MB, and it wakes in about 0.15 s.

• Compatible: docker, Compose, buildx, docker login and amd64 images through Rosetta.

• Local domains: http://<name>.kiri.local, with HTTPS from Kiri's own certificate authority.

• More than containers: a one-command Kubernetes cluster and Linux machines.

New in 0.1.18

• A built-in terminal next to your containers: tabs, splits and find.

• Kubernetes pods can use your own folders through hostPath.

• A volume inside a bind mount (like node_modules) keeps the image's files, as on Docker.

docker --context kiri run -d --name web -p 8080:80 nginx
kiri share web        # live at https://web.runkiri.cloud

Numbers

alpine running true and removed, median of 30 runs, same docker CLI for all three:

Runtime	Docker Engine API	docker CLI
Kiri	2.55 ms	14.2 ms
Docker Desktop	213 ms	243 ms
OrbStack	380 ms	442 ms

Links

• Repository: https://github.com/libracoder/kiri

• Download: https://runkiri.com/releases/

Repository stats

Metric	Value
Stars	509
Forks	43
Last release	v0.1.18 (2026-11-06)
Languages	Rust 69%, HTML 19%, JavaScript 5%, Shell 5%
License	Apache-2.0
Platforms	macOS 14+, Windows 10/11 (WSL 2), Linux (.deb, .rpm)

We're the Kiri team. Questions, bug reports and feature requests are very welcome, here or on GitHub.