We recently open-sourced lume, a CLI built on top Apple's Virtualization and Hypervisor frameworks, built specifically for Apple Silicon to support our future tool-building needs.

We're grateful for the overwhelming support from HN and our community on Discord - seeing nearly 2k stars and many open issues in such a short time has been incredible.

lume is released under the flexible MIT license and will always remain so to encourage community contributions.

Core features:

- Run native macOS VMs in 1 command: `lume run macos-sequoia-xcode:latest`

- Prebuilt images on https://ghcr.io/trycua (macOS Sequoia, Ubuntu ARM)

- Local API server to manage VMs programmatically

- A python SDK on [github.com/trycua/pylume](https://github.com/trycua/pylume)

What our first users say:

- ‘Something like Lume should have been a commodity in the ecosystem much earlier. Thanks for going ahead to change that.’

- ‘I’ve been using Colima for a year now to run desktop docker workloads. It would be nice to be able to remove the extra layer of qemu they use.‘

- ‘Looks interesting! I’ve been playing with UTM to do aarch64 VMs and I even cooked up a little Sinatra server to do some AppleScript to reboot the VM and do some other things on the host. I’ll look at this as a more robust solution as to be completely honest, UTM has left a lot to be desired at least for virtualization.‘

Future directions (as asked by our community and design partners):

- Docker-compatible interface for macOS VMs

- VM suspension and Snapshot management

- GPU passthrough (with Paravirtualized Graphics)

- Flexible VM, Images and IPSW locations

- Sharing USB devices

- Remote SSH commands and more UI automation features

Common Questions:

How does this differ from lima, UTM and Tart: https://github.com/trycua/lume/issues/10

How to Install macOS from an IPSW Image: https://github.com/trycua/lume/blob/main/docs/FAQ.md#how-to-...

How do I install a custom Linux image: https://github.com/trycua/lume/blob/main/docs/FAQ.md#how-do-...

Python SDK: [github.com/trycua/pylume](https://github.com/trycua/pylume)

Discord for feedback: https://discord.com/invite/5ngXY2Wn