Make docker optional

[apnar]

Great work, I've been enjoying your setup. I'm running on microk8s though instead of docker. A recent change added preflight checks, which is great, but it made docker a hard requirement for the setup script to run. Easy enough quick fix commenting out the check line in the setup script but it'd be nice not to have to do that every time. Would you consider making the check a warning (like you do for Nvidia toolkit) as opposed to a hard stop?

[noonghunna]

You're right. Audited what setup.sh actually does post-preflight (lines 90-280): genesis git fetch, curl downloads, sha256sum verification. None of that touches docker. The docker requirement only matters for the final docker compose up -d step, which is in the user's hands anyway. switch.sh already has COMPOSE_BIN="${COMPOSE_BIN:-docker compose}" env override.

So the docker preflight in setup.sh is over-aggressive — it gates work that doesn't need docker. Will demote it to a warning (✓ found / ⚠ not found, never ✗) so non-docker container-runtime users (microk8s, podman, k8s, manual) can fetch genesis + models without working around the gate. Your "comment out the line" workaround would have worked fine, which is itself the proof the gate isn't load-bearing.

Will land in setup.sh; switch.sh keeps the hard check because it actually invokes docker commands directly. If you have a microk8s pipeline that translates the compose file to a k8s manifest, a brief writeup as a docs PR would be useful for the next person — happy to merge.

[noonghunna]

Quick update: shipped on master in 2f8ed19 — setup.sh now treats the docker check as soft-warn (✓ found / ⚠ not found), no longer hard-fails. From the change:

# docker is soft-warn for setup.sh — this script only fetches genesis + models,
# no docker invocations until you actually `docker compose up` later. Hard-failing
# blocks non-docker container-runtime users (microk8s / podman / k8s / manual)
# from running setup at all (club-3090 disc #48). launch.sh keeps the hard check
# because it actually invokes docker.
preflight_docker || echo "[preflight] WARN:  docker unavailable — setup will continue (genesis + model fetch don't need docker), but you'll need a working container runtime before 'docker compose up'."

launch.sh keeps the hard check because it actually invokes docker commands directly. So the boundary is:

• bash scripts/setup.sh qwen3.6-27b — works without docker (warns once, continues with genesis + model fetch + sha256 verify)
• bash scripts/launch.sh ... — still requires docker (would fail anyway since it docker compose ups)
• bash scripts/switch.sh ... — still requires docker for the same reason; COMPOSE_BIN env override (COMPOSE_BIN="podman compose") was already there from earlier

Pull + retry should work now without your --no-docker-check workaround. If you're up for a docs PR with the microk8s integration story (how you actually run the compose under microk8s — the manifest translation pattern), that'd be useful for the next person down this path. Happy to merge a docs/CONTAINER_RUNTIMES.md or similar.