Home

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.

Features

Available features include:

• Port forwarding between the VM and the host using TCP or Unix sockets
• Dynamic port forwarding updates while virtual machines are running
• Network creation in bridge, hosted, or NAT mode
• Cloud-Init support for VM initialization and customization
• Automatic installation of an in-guest agent, with source code in cakeagent

Components

caked - Core Daemon

caked is the core daemon process that handles virtual machine lifecycle management, including building, running, and orchestrating virtual machines with configuration-driven workflows.

cakectl - Command Line Interface

cakectl is the command-line interface tool used to interact with caked. It provides commands to:

• Build and deploy applications
• Manage virtual machine configurations
• View logs and status
• Control the daemon process

Caker.app - macOS Desktop Application

Caker.app is the macOS desktop application that provides a graphical experience for working with virtual machines managed by caked. It acts as the user-facing control plane of the project and is designed for day-to-day local development workflows.

Quick Start

Get started with Caker by following our Getting Started Guide.

Documentation

• Getting Started - Setup and first steps
• Architecture - System design and components
• Development - Contributing and building from source
• Command Summary - Complete command reference
• Troubleshooting - Common issues and solutions
• FAQ - Frequently asked questions
• Release Notes - Version history and changes

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

Contributing

See our Contributing Guide for details on how to contribute to the project.

License

This project is licensed under the AGPL v3 License.