Meet container: Apple’s Open-Source Swift Tool for Running Linux Containers as Lightweight VMs on Apple Silicon

Apple research team recently released the container project . It is an open-source command-line tool written in Swift. It creates and runs Linux containers as lightweight virtual machines on a Mac. The project ships under the Apache 2.0 license and targets Apple silicon.

Containers are how you ship reproducible environments from a laptop to a datacenter. Apple now offers a native path that avoids a single always-on Linux VM.

container is a CLI tool that can be used to build images, run containers, and move images to and from registries. It consumes and produces OCI-compatible container images. So you can pull from Docker Hub or GitHub Container Registry and run those images. You can also push images you build to any standard registry.

container uses the open-source Containerization Swift package. That package handles low-level container, image, and process management. The tool requires a Mac with Apple silicon. Intel Macs are not supported. Apple supports container on macOS 26, which adds virtualization and networking enhancements. You can run it on macOS 15, but with networking limitations.

Most macOS container tools run one shared Linux VM that hosts every container. Apple takes a different path. container runs a separate lightweight VM for each container you create. Apple describes three properties of this design:

The runtime integrates several macOS frameworks. It uses the Virtualization framework for the VMs, and the vmnet framework for networking. It uses XPC for interprocess communication, launchd for service management, and Keychain services for registry credentials.

The control plane has a few moving parts. container system start launches container-apiserver , a launch agent. The apiserver then starts an XPC helper container-core-images for image management and the local content store. It also starts container-network-vmnet for the virtual network. For each container, it launches container-runtime-linux , the per-container management helper.

Local backend development. Run a service in its own isolated VM, then forward a port to your loopback address.

Reproducible CI-style builds. container build starts a builder utility container that uses BuildKit. You can size the builder VM for heavy builds.

Cross-architecture images for datacenter deployment. Build one image for both Apple silicon and x86-64 servers. The amd64 variant runs under Rosetta translation.