how to validate cloud SDK dispatcher files without docker?

The instructions to use dispatcher tools here are missing some information, e.g. where to install it, and how to link it to a particular project.  I installed it in my home dir for want of a better option.

It says to use:

./bin/validate.sh ./src

Here we are guessing we need to substitute ./src for our config files?  e.g.

./bin/validate.sh /Users/me/dev/git/some-project/dispatcher/src?

Or maybe we are supposed to copy the files into the src dir in the dispatcher tools dir?

Running this does the following:

me@my-M1 dispatcher % ./bin/validate.sh ./src

Phase 1: Dispatcher validator

Cloud manager validator 2.0.32

2021/10/26 12:54:01 No issues found

Phase 1 finished

Phase 2: httpd -t validation in docker image

values.csv found in deployment folder: /tmp/dispatcher_validation_1635245641 - using files listed there

Required image not found, trying to load from archive...

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?

** error: required image still not found: adobe/aem-ethos/dispatcher-publish:2.0.57

It seems to be doing the validation (and throwing up syntax errors) before trying to run docker, which is all we need.

Im using an M1 mac, and don't have docker working. Also, we want to do the validate in the azure devops build pipeline, without starting up the dispatcher (just check the files).  Not sure how we would merge the dispatcher and our project into the same pipeline though - presumably we need to create a VM, install dispatcher tools, then pull in our source from git, then run the validator (without docker), then run mvn build as normal? we do this mvn build in the pipline before pushing the source to the real AEM Cloud git becuase when we run the mvn build, it takes a few minutes, but the Adobe one takes around 2 hours.  We dont want to wait for 2 hours to find there was a syntax error, so we build first, and throw awawy the result.

is here any way to check the dispatcher files without starting docker?  Could we use plain old apache for this, or does the dispatcher tools do some AEM specific checks?