Apple has released container 1.0, an open-source Swift CLI tool that eliminates the traditional shared virtual machine model by isolating individual Linux containers within their own dedicated, lightweight micro-VMs on Apple silicon.
Apple released container 1.0, an official, native open-source command-line interface (CLI) tool on 9 June 2026. container inverts the need of single, large, shared Linux virtual machine (VM) hosting all containers on a shared kernel by running each individual Linux container inside its own dedicated, isolated, lightweight micro-VM.
It utilises macOS’s native Virtualization and vmnet frameworks. Because isolation occurs at the VM boundary, idle containers can automatically free up their memory footprint, reducing the overall overhead compared to standard shared VMs. The tool natively consumes and produces standard, Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compatible container images. Users can pull directly from public registries like Docker Hub or GitHub Container Registry (GHCR) and push images back without needing format conversions.
It supports building cross-architecture images (e.g., building for both ARM64 and x86-64 data centres simultaneously) and runs x86-64 (amd64) image variants via Apple’s Rosetta translation layer. It introduces persistent Linux environments called “container machines” (built from any OCI image containing /sbin/init). This feature automatically mounts the user’s host home directory and maps the inner login user to match their Mac account, allowing filesystems to persist through stop and start cycles.
System configurations have transitioned to a structured TOML file located at ~/.config/container/config.toml. The tool is explicitly optimised only for Apple silicon Macs, completely leaving Intel Macs unsupported. It runs best on macOS 26, is distributed under the open-source Apache 2.0 licence, and surpassed 30,000 GitHub stars within days of its release. Multi-container environments like Docker Compose are currently unsupported.
