container

container is an application that you can use to create and run Linux containers as lightweight virtual machines on your Mac. It's written in Swift, and optimized for Apple Silicon.

The application consumes and produces OCI-compliant container images, so you can pull and run images from any standard container registry. You can push images that you build to those registries as well, and run the images in any other OCI-compliant application.

container uses the Containerization Swift package for low level container, image and process management.

Get started

Install the container application on your Mac.

Requirements

You need an Apple Silicon Mac to build and run container.

To build the Containerization package, your system needs either:

• macOS 15 or newer and Xcode 17 beta.
• macOS 16 Developer Preview.

container is designed to take advantage of the features of the macOS 16 Developer Preview. You can run the application on macOS Sequoia, but the container maintainers typically will not address Sequoia issues that cannot be reproduced on the macOS 16 Developer Beta.

There are significant networking limitations that impact the usability container on macOS Sequoia.

Install or upgrade

If you're upgrading, first uninstall your existing container while preserving your user data:

uninstall-container.sh -k

Download the latest application installer package from the Github release page.

To install the application, double click the package file and follow the instructions. Enter your administrator password when prompted to give the installer permission to place the application under /usr/local.

Uninstall

Use the uninstall-container.sh script to remove the application from your system. To remove your user data along with the application, run:

uninstall-container.sh -d

To retain your user data so that it is available should you reinstall later, run:

uninstall-container.sh -k

Build the application from source

Build container and the background services from sources and run basic and integration tests:

make all test integration

Copy the binaries to /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/libexec (requires entering the administrator's password):

make install

Protobufs

container depends on specific versions of grpc-swift and swift-protobuf. You can install them and re-generate RPC interfaces with:

make protos

Contributing

See docs for information on development and contribution to the container project.

More Info:

• Take a guided tour of container by building, running, and publishing a simple web server image.
• Read through How to use the features of container.
• A brief description and technical overview of container.