The native UI
for Apple Containers

Orchard is the best app for Apple's container tooling. It allows you to manage containers and machines, local kubernetes clusters, bridge local AI models into them, and run agents in isolated sandboxes, all without needing to drop to the CLI.

It is being used by engineers at Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, IBM, Stripe, LinkedIn, Uber, GitHub, Amazon, VMware, Alibaba, Tencent, MongoDB, Honeycomb and Vercel amongst many others.

brew install orchard

Open source under MIT

The Orchard dashboard - system-wide CPU, memory, network and disk with per-container utilisation

Built for the desktop:fast, focused, native

Orchard is a native Swift app that uses the XPC protocol for efficiency, and is fully signed. No Electron, no web views, no performance issues from shelling to the CLI.

Compose

Bring your compose files

Point Orchard at a compose.yaml and bring the whole project up in dependency order, or take it down again. Projects are found by the labels on their containers, so a stack you started in the terminal appears here without being imported, and the same planner backs the container compose plugin.

A compose project in Orchard: three services with their IP addresses and hostnames, and the network the project created

No silent drops

It tells you what it will not do

Anything the file asks for that cannot be honoured is listed before the first run, split into what the runtime makes impossible and what is simply not built yet, each with the line it sits on. The project goes on showing it afterwards, because three weeks later nobody remembers what they accepted.

The Problems tab of a compose project in Orchard, listing unhandled keys grouped by whether the runtime makes them impossible or they are not built yet

Containers

Manage your containers live, with filtering, grouping and bulk actions.

Machines

Managing a container machine in Orchard, with live resource usage

Create, run and monitor persistent Linux VMs on your Mac. Learn more →

Kubernetes clusters

A local Kubernetes cluster in Orchard with kubectl access

Create and manage local k8s clusters on the container runtime. Learn more →

Local AI models

The AI Models view in Orchard: a local model server with its container-reachable endpoint

Discover MLX, Ollama and LM Studio servers on your Mac - and bridge them into your containers. Inference stays on the Silicon. Learn more →

Sandboxes

A sandboxed agent in Orchard with the Isolated badge and model endpoint

A sandbox is a container wired to a local model on a host-only network: it can reach the model but not the internet, with a kill-switch. Run your own agents safely. Learn more →

Command palette

Cmd+K fuzzy-searches every resource and runs actions from the keyboard - "stop db", "logs api", "console web".

Image management

Pull, delete and search Docker Hub directly, and run containers straight from an image.

Multi-pane logs

Stream logs from several containers side by side, with split panes and line filtering.

Networks

Every container gets its own local IP. Control your networks of containers, machines, clusters and sandboxes.

DNS domains

Give containers real hostnames. Set the default DNS domain and add or remove domains without root gymnastics.

Mounts

See which host paths and volumes each container mounts, and jump straight to them in Finder.

Menu bar

One click in your memory bar and you can see what's running and how it's using resources.

Dashboard

A helicopter view of everything container is running.

Get started in seconds

Every release is code-signed with a registered Apple Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so it installs cleanly with no Gatekeeper warnings.

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