One Tip a Week: Spin Up a Clean Mac in Seconds

This week's tip of the week is Tart, a command-line tool for running macOS and Linux virtual machines on Apple Silicon.

Ever need a completely clean Mac to test something?

Maybe you want to try an installer, reproduce a bug on another macOS version, test some setup instructions, or just experiment without turning your actual machine into a science project.

Tart makes that surprisingly easy.

Install it:

brew install openai/tools/tart

Homebrew may ask you to explicitly trust the OpenAI tap or specific formulas during installation. That trust decision is up to you.

Then clone a prebuilt macOS image and run it:

tart clone ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-tahoe-base:latest tahoe-base
tart run tahoe-base

And just like that, you have a fresh macOS Tahoe VM running locally.

Tart also has images for other macOS versions, including images with Xcode already installed. It’s not just for macOS either. Tart also has prebuilt Linux images for Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.

What I really like is how familiar the workflow feels if you already work with containers.

You can clone VMs, run them from the CLI, mount directories from your host:

tart run --dir=project:~/src/project tahoe-base

and even push and pull VM images from OCI-compatible registries:

tart push my-vm ghcr.io/you/my-vm:latest
tart pull ghcr.io/you/my-vm:latest

These aren't containers. They're full virtual machines, but the workflow feels very Docker-ish.

You can even SSH into a running VM:

ssh admin@$(tart ip tahoe-base)

One practical gotcha I ran into: if the VM has network connectivity but DNS resolution isn't working, you can set the DNS servers manually:

sudo networksetup -setdnsservers Ethernet 1.1.1.1 8.8.8.8

Use whatever DNS servers you prefer.

A couple of caveats: Tart requires Apple Silicon, and macOS images are large, so this isn't exactly pulling Alpine.

Still, being able to spin up a disposable Mac from the terminal is pretty damn useful.

Check out the Tart quick start and give it a spin.

That's it! Short and sweet. Until the next one!

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