container is a tool 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 tool consumes and produces OCI-compatible 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-compatible application.
container uses the Containerization Swift package for low-level container, image, and process management.
You need a Mac with Apple silicon to run container. To build it, see the BUILDING document.
container is supported on macOS 26, since it takes advantage of new features and enhancements to virtualization and networking in this release. We do not support older versions of macOS and the container maintainers typically will not address issues that cannot be reproduced on macOS 26.
Download the latest signed installer package for container from the GitHub release page.
To install the tool, double-click the package file and follow the instructions. Enter your administrator password when prompted, to give the installer permission to place the installed files under /usr/local.
Start the system service with:
container system start
container run --rm alpine echo helloThis pulls the alpine image, runs it in a lightweight Linux VM, prints hello, and
removes the container when it exits. See the tutorial
for a fuller walkthrough that builds and publishes an image of your own.
For both upgrading and downgrading, you can manually download and install the signed installer package by following the steps from initial install or use the update-container.sh script (installed to /usr/local/bin).
If you're upgrading or downgrading, you must stop your existing container:
container system stop
To upgrade to the latest release, simply run the command below:
/usr/local/bin/update-container.sh
To downgrade, you must uninstall your existing container (the -k flag keeps your user data, while -d removes it):
/usr/local/bin/uninstall-container.sh -k /usr/local/bin/update-container.sh -v 0.3.0
Start the system service with:
container system start
Use the uninstall-container.sh script (installed to /usr/local/bin) to remove container from your system. To remove your user data along with the tool, run:
/usr/local/bin/uninstall-container.sh -d
To retain your user data so that it is available should you reinstall later, run:
/usr/local/bin/uninstall-container.sh -k
- Take a guided tour of
containerby building, running, and publishing a simple web server image. - Learn how to use various
containerfeatures. - Explore the container-examples repo that contains examples that show you how to work with
container, such as developing Linux apps in a container machine with Visual Studio Code and running a three-tier app on a container cluster behind a gateway. - Read a brief description and technical overview of
container. - Browse the full command reference.
- Build and run
containeron your own development system. - View the project API documentation.
Contributions to container are welcome and encouraged. Please see our main contributing guide for more information.
The container project is under active development. Its release versions are product versions, not semantic versions.
The container CLI compatibility generally preserves backward compatibility within a major release (not breaking existing scripts), however, there may be the odd case where breaking compatibility may be necessary. Note: Features marked experimental (for example, the cluster subcommand) may change and do not guarantee backward compatibility.
The container-apiserver XPC API compatibility preserves forward and backward compatibility within a major version.
Other non-public XPC helpers do not guarantee CLI or API compatibility across different versions.
The container application data provides forward compatibility only, guaranteed within one major version. Upgrading to a newer major version may require a specific upgrade path.