Tart is a virtualization toolset to build, run and manage macOS and Linux virtual machines on Apple Silicon. Built by CI engineers for your automation needs. Here are some highlights of Tart:

• Tart uses Apple's own Virtualization.Framework for near-native performance.
• Push/Pull virtual machines from any OCI-compatible container registry.
• Use Tart Packer Plugin to automate VM creation.
• Built-in CI integration.

Tart is already adopted by several automation services:

Try running a Tart VM on your Apple Silicon device running macOS Monterey or later (will download a 25 GB image):

brew install cirruslabs/cli/tart
tart clone ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-monterey-base:latest monterey-base
tart run monterey-base

Tart itself is only responsible for managing virtual machines, but we've built Tart support into a tool called Cirrus CLI also developed by Cirrus Labs. Cirrus CLI is a command line tool with one configuration format to execute common CI steps (run a script, cache a folder, etc.) locally or in any CI system. We built Cirrus CLI to solve "But it works on my machine!" problem.

Here is an example of a .cirrus.yml configuration file which will start a Tart VM, will copy over working directory and will run scripts and other instructions inside the virtual machine:

task:
  name: hello
  macos_instance:
    # can be a remote or a local virtual machine
    image: ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-monterey-base:latest
  hello_script:
    - echo "Hello from within a Tart VM!"
    - echo "Here is my CPU info:"
    - sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string
    - sleep 15

Put the above .cirrus.yml file in the root of your repository and run it with the following command:

brew install cirruslabs/cli/cirrus
cirrus run

Cirrus CI already leverages Tart to power its macOS cloud infrastructure. The .cirrus.yml config from above will just work in Cirrus CI and your tasks will be executed inside Tart VMs in our cloud.

Note: Cirrus CI only allows images managed and regularly updated by us.

In many cases there is a need to retrieve particular files or a folder from within a Tart virtual machine. For example, the below .cirrus.yml configuration defines a single task that builds a tart binary and exposes it via artifacts instruction:

task:
  name: Build
  macos_instance:
    image: ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-monterey-xcode:latest
  build_script: swift build --product tart
  binary_artifacts:
    path: .build/debug/tart

Running Cirrus CLI with --artifacts-dir will write defined artifacts to the provided local directory on the host:

cirrus run --artifacts-dir artifacts

Note that all retrieved artifacts will be prefixed with the associated task name and artifacts instruction name. For the example above, tart binary will be saved to $PWD/artifacts/Build/binary/.build/debug/tart.

Tart supports macOS and Linux virtual machines. All commands like run and pull work the same way regarding of the underlying OS a particular VM image has. The only difference is how such VM images are created. Please check sections below for macOS and Linux instructions.

Tart can create VMs from *.ipsw files. You can download a specific *.ipsw file here or you can use latest instead of a path to *.ipsw to download the latest available version:

tart create --from-ipsw=latest monterey-vanilla
tart run monterey-vanilla

After the initial booting of the VM you'll need to manually go through the macOS installation process. As a convention we recommend creating an admin user with an admin password. After the regular installation please do some additional modifications in the VM:

1. Enable Auto-Login. Users & Groups -> Login Options -> Automatic login -> admin.
2. Allow SSH. Sharing -> Remote Login
3. Disable Lock Screen. Preferences -> Lock Screen -> disable "Require Password" after 5.
4. Disable Screen Saver.
5. Run sudo visudo in Terminal, find %admin ALL=(ALL) ALL add admin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL to allow sudo without a password.

# Create a bare VM
tart create --linux ubuntu

# Install Ubuntu
tart run --disk focal-desktop-arm64.iso ubuntu

# Run VM
tart run ubuntu

After the initial setup please make sure your VM can be SSH-ed into by running the following commands inside your VM:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y openssh-server
sudo ufw allow ssh

By default, a tart VM uses 2 CPUs and 4 GB of memory with a 1024x768 display. This can be changed with tart set command. Please refer to tart set --help for additional details.

Please refer to Tart Packer Plugin repository for setup instructions. Here is an example of a template to build monterey-base local image based of a remote image:

{
  "builders": [
    {
      "name": "tart",
      "type": "tart-cli",
      "vm_base_name": "tartvm/vanilla:latest",
      "vm_name": "monterey-base",
      "cpu_count": 4,
      "memory_gb": 8,
      "disk_size_gb": 32,
      "ssh_username": "admin",
      "ssh_password": "admin",
      "ssh_timeout": "120s"
    }
  ],
  "provisioners": [
    {
      "inline": [
        "echo 'Disabling spotlight indexing...'",
        "sudo mdutil -a -i off"
      ],
      "type": "shell"
    },
    # more provisioners
  ]
}

Here is a repository with Packer templates used to build all the images managed by us.

For example, let's say you want to push/pull images to a registry hosted at https://acme.io/.

First, you need to log in and save credential for acme.io host via tart login command:

tart login acme.io

Credentials are securely stored in Keychain.

Once credentials are saved for acme.io, run the following command to push a local images remotely with two tags:

tart push my-local-vm-name acme.io/remoteorg/name:latest acme.io/remoteorg/name:v1.0.0

You can either pull an image:

tart pull acme.io/remoteorg/name:latest

...or instantiate a VM from a remote image:

tart clone acme.io/remoteorg/name:latest my-local-vm-name

This invocation calls the tart pull implicitly (if the image is not being present) before doing the actual cloning.

tart create --from-ipsw=latest --disk-size=25 monterey-vanilla