Quick Start

Try running a Tart VM on your Apple Silicon device running macOS 12.0 (Monterey) or later (will download a 25 GB image):

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

SSH access¶

If the guest VM is running and configured to accept incoming SSH connections you can conveniently connect to it like so:

ssh admin@$(tart ip macos-monterey-base)

To mount a directory, run the VM with the --dir argument:

tart run --dir=project:~/src/project vm

Here, the project specifies a mount name, whereas the ~/src/project is a path to the host's directory to expose to the VM.

It is also possible to mount directories in read-only mode by adding a third parameter, ro:

tart run --dir=project:~/src/project:ro vm

To mount multiple directories, repeat the --dir argument for each directory:

tart run --dir=www1:~/project1/www --dir=www2:~/project2/www

Note that the first parameter in each --dir argument must be unique, otherwise only the last --dir argument using that name will be used.

Note: to use the directory mounting feature, the host needs to run macOS 13.0 (Ventura) or newer.

All shared directories are automatically mounted to /Volumes/My Shared Files directory.

The directory we've mounted above will be accessible from the /Volumes/My Shared Files/project path inside a guest VM.

Note: to use the directory mounting feature, the guest VM needs to run macOS 13.0 (Ventura) or newer.

To be able to access the shared directories from the Linux guest, you need to manually mount the virtual filesystem first:

mount -t virtiofs com.apple.virtio-fs.automount /mnt/shared

The directory we've mounted above will be accessible from the /mnt/shared/project path inside a guest VM.