vfkit - Command-line tool to start VMs on macOS

September 1, 2025 · View on GitHub

Introduction

vfkit offers a command-line interface to start virtual machines using the macOS Virtualization framework. It also provides a github.com/crc-org/vfkit/pkg/config go package. This package implements a native Go API to generate the vfkit command line.

Usage

See https://github.com/crc-org/vfkit/blob/main/doc/usage.md

Presentations

vfkit has been presented at a few conferences:

Containers Plumbing 2023
FOSDEM 2023

Adopters

minikube 1.35.0 and newer - minikube quickly sets up a local Kubernetes cluster
podman 5.0 and newer - podman is a free software CLI tool to manage containers, pods and images
crc - crc sets up local OpenShift or MicroShift clusters for development and testing purposes
ovm - ovm is used by Oomol Studio to run linux containers on macOS

Installation

vfkit can be installed via brew.

brew install vfkit

Building

From the root direction of this repository, run make.