Caker

Caker is a Swift-native virtualization platform for macOS that streamlines VM lifecycle management from development to operations. It combines a powerful daemon (caked) with a practical CLI (cakectl) so teams can build, run, inspect, and automate virtual machines consistently.

It is designed around two complementary components:

• caked: the daemon/service that performs VM, image, and network operations
• cakectl: the CLI client used to control caked

In typical usage, cakectl sends commands to caked through gRPC, and caked executes lifecycle actions such as build, launch, start/stop, image pull/push, and network management.

Use this wiki as the central reference for architecture, command usage, troubleshooting, and operational workflows.

Contributor guide: CONTRIBUTING.md

Quick links

• Getting Started
• Architecture
• Development
• Troubleshooting
• FAQ
• Release Notes
• Command Summary
• Cheat Sheet

Repository map

• Sources/caked/ – daemon entrypoints and commands
• Sources/cakectl/ – CLI commands and client logic
• Sources/cakedlib/ – shared core library
• Sources/grpc/ – gRPC layer and generated interfaces
• Tests/ and Caker/CakerTests/ – test suites