Supabase with Colima: error from daemon `docker.sock` operation not supported

June 1, 2026

TLDR

sudo ln -s ~/.colima/default/docker.sock /var/run/docker.sock
export DOCKER_HOST='unix:///var/run/docker.sock'

Context

Working on a Supabase project, wanna run the whole stack locally using supabase start.

Supabase local development environment is based on Docker containers, so we need a runtime for it. Docs mention Docker Desktop, Rancher Desktop, Podman and OrbStack.

But I like to be different and I want to use Colima. 😂

However supabase start fails with:

failed to start docker container "supabase_vector_myapp":
Error response from daemon: error while creating mount source path '~/.colima/default/docker.sock':
mkdir ~/.colima/default/docker.sock: operation not supported

Found the same error on this Reddit post with the following fix:

ln -s ~/.colima/default/docker.sock /tmp/docker.sock
export DOCKER_HOST='unix:///tmp/docker.sock'

But in my case, while this goes a bit further, I just get another error. (And the post is archived so I can’t even mention the final solution there, oh well.)

ERROR source{component_kind="source" component_id=docker_host component_type=docker_logs}:
vector::sources::docker_logs: Listing currently running containers failed.
error=HyperLegacyError {
  err: hyper_util::client::legacy::Error(Connect, Os {
    code: 111,
    kind: ConnectionRefused,
    message: "Connection refused"
  })
}

Nothing came up online for this error so hopefully this blog post will help if anyone runs into this.

However I stumbled more generic threads of trying to configure Colima to use the default Docker socket, where the way to do this is:

sudo ln -s ~/.colima/default/docker.sock /var/run/docker.sock
export DOCKER_HOST='unix:///var/run/docker.sock'

So same as before but with /var/run/docker.sock instead of /tmp/docker.sock.

That worked flawlessly for me!

TLDR

Context

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