The cosmosdb emulator doesn’t support running in the arm64 architecutre. There is an issue about that, but there was no workaround of that problem. I found a workaround to run this emulator on my M1 MacBook Pro, so I’d like to note how to do it.

* I wrote this in the issue as a comment, but I would like to copy into my blog as well.

Hello, recently I found a workaround for using the CosmosDB Emulator on my M1 MacBook Pro. I use colima with a VM which architecutre is x86_64. There were some issues with the combination of the latest versions, so we have to use the specific versions of colima and an emulator at this time.

  1. Install colima@0.6.8

⚠️ When I used the latest version(0.6.9), the emulator didn’t start. The cause seems to be the VM image, which is updated in the latest version.

❯ curl -o colima@0.6.8 -L https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/releases/download/v0.6.8/colima-Darwin-arm64
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
100 7759k  100 7759k    0     0   994k      0  0:00:07  0:00:07 --:--:-- 1114k

❯ colima@0.6.8 version
colima version 0.6.8
git commit: 9b0809d0ed9ad3ff1e57c405f27324e6298ca04f
  1. Create a VM with --arch option

To emulate x86_64 architecutre, we have to use this option.

⚠️ I tried with rosetta options, but the emulator didn’t run.

❯ colima@0.6.8 start -p x86_64 --arch x86_64
  1. Run an emulator tagged mongodb
❯ docker run \
  --publish 8081:8081 \
  --publish 10250-10255:10250-10255 \
  --interactive \
  --tty \
  --env AZURE_COSMOS_EMULATOR_PARTITION_COUNT=1 \
  mcr.microsoft.com/cosmosdb/linux/azure-cosmos-emulator:mongodb
Unable to find image 'mcr.microsoft.com/cosmosdb/linux/azure-cosmos-emulator:mongodb' locally
mongodb: Pulling from cosmosdb/linux/azure-cosmos-emulator
...
Digest: sha256:28188604ad7be14497e1eb19757a6dd161b38dbb0508581b87fcda17879ebc34
Status: Downloaded newer image for mcr.microsoft.com/cosmosdb/linux/azure-cosmos-emulator:mongodb
This is an evaluation version.  There are [121] days left in the evaluation period.
Starting
Started 1/2 partitions
Started 2/2 partitions
Started

⚠️ The latest version doesn’t work in my environment. The images that I downloaded is the following.

❯ docker images --digests
REPOSITORY                                               TAG       DIGEST                                                                    IMAGE ID       CREATED       SIZE
mcr.microsoft.com/cosmosdb/linux/azure-cosmos-emulator   latest    sha256:bf9ddf53430701e6d954bdc8cd07ef672f0642a55244e2d4b0b478a633e89d27   b05a7af77243   3 weeks ago   2.35GB
mcr.microsoft.com/cosmosdb/linux/azure-cosmos-emulator   mongodb   sha256:28188604ad7be14497e1eb19757a6dd161b38dbb0508581b87fcda17879ebc34   94581d68a4f3   7 weeks ago   2.27GB
  1. Then, you can access https://localhost:8081/_explorer/index.html 🎉

Actually, a month ago, it had worked when I used the latest version of colima and the emulator. And I tried in the new environment, then, I faced some issues and investigates how to work. I don’t know why the emulator is tagged “mongodb”, but it works in my environment.

I hope this helps you 🙏

The cover image was generated by DALL·E 3 and the prompt is the following.

Colimaを利用してx86_64をエミュレートして、CosmosDBEmulatorをAppleSilicon上で動かすためのブログのアイキャッチ画像

This was the first time to use Generative AI to generate the image, but I surprised that even though the prompt is very rough, the generated image was decent…