Quick Start

Tart is great for running workloads on a single machine, but what if you have more than one computer at your disposal and a couple of VMs is not enough anymore for your needs? This is where Orchard comes in to play!

It allows you to orchestrate multiple Tart-capable hosts from either an Orchard CLI (which we demonstrate below) or through the API.

The easiest way to start is to run Orchard in local development mode:

brew install cirruslabs/cli/orchard
orchard dev

This will run an Orchard Controller and an Orchard Worker in a single process on your local machine, allowing you to test both the CLI functionality and the API from a tool like cURL or programming language of choice, without the need to authenticate requests.

Note that in production deployments, these two components are started separately and enable security by default. Please refer to Deploying Controller and Deploying Workers for more information.

Creating Virtual Machines¶

Now, let's create a Virtual Machine:

orchard create vm --image ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-sonoma-base:latest sonoma-base

You can check a list of VM resources to see if the Virtual Machine we've created above is already running:

orchard list vms

Accessing Virtual Machines¶

Orchard has an ability to do port forwarding that ssh and vnc commands are built on top of. All port forwarding connections are done via the Orchard Controller instance which "proxies" a secure connection to the Orchard Workers.

Therefore, your workers can be located under a stricter firewall that only allows connections to the Orchard Controller instance. Orchard Controller instance is secured by default and all API calls are authenticated and authorized.

SSH¶

To SSH into a VM, use the orchard ssh command:

orchard ssh vm sonoma-base

You can specify the --username and --password flags to specify the username/password pair to use for the SSH protocol. By default, admin/admin is used.

You can also execute remote commands instead of spawning a login shell, similarly to how OpenSSH's ssh command accepts a command argument:

orchard ssh vm sonoma-base "uname -a"

You can execute scripts remotely this way, by telling the remote command-line interpreter to read from the standard input and using the redirection operator as follows:

orchard ssh vm sonoma-base "bash -s" < script.sh

VNC¶

Similarly to ssh command, you can use vnc command to open Screen Sharing into a remote VM:

orchard vnc vm sonoma-base

You can specify the --username and --password flags to specify the username/password pair to use for the VNC protocol. By default, admin/admin is used.

Deleting Virtual Machines¶

The following command will delete the VM we've created above and clean-up the resources associated with it:

orchard delete vm sonoma-base

Environment variables¶

In addition to controlling the Orchard via the CLI arguments, there are environment variables that may be beneficial both when automating Orchard and in daily use:

Variable name	Description
`ORCHARD_HOME`	Override Orchard's home directory. Useful when running multiple Orchard instances on the same host and when testing.
`ORCHARD_LICENSE_TIER`	The default license limit only allows connecting 4 Orchard Workers to the Orchard Controller. If you've purchased a Gold Tier License, set this variable to `gold` to increase the limit to 20 Orchard Workers. And if you've purchased a Platinum Tier License, set this variable to `platinum` to increase the limit to 200 Orchard Workers.
`ORCHARD_URL`	Override controller URL on per-command basis.
`ORCHARD_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME`	Override service account name (used for controller API auth) on per-command basis.
`ORCHARD_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN`	Override service account token (used for controller API auth) on per-command basis.