orchard

brew install orchard

See all install options

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Orchard is a native (Swift) macOS application for managing containers using Apple’s container tooling.

It gives you a desktop experience that complements the container command-line interface.

Hundreds of installations and starred by engineers from Apple, Microsoft, Red Hat, GitHub & more - see who’s adopting Orchard

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• Benefits of Apple Containers
• Orchard Features
• How Orchard compares
• Requirements
• Architecture
• Installation
  • Homebrew
  • Release download
  • Build from Source
• Adoption
• Star History
• License

Benefits of Apple Containers

• Native support, incredible performance and the engineering resources to make it work.
• Sub second startup times
• Kernel isolation by design
• Easier networking - no more port mapping (every container gets its own IP address), networks out of the box

Orchard Features

• Container management: create, start, stop, force stop, delete
• Image management: pull, delete, search Docker Hub
• Network and DNS domain management
• Real-time container stats with sortable columns
• Sortable container and image lists with persistent preferences
• Multi-container log viewer with split panes, filtering, and per-container colour coding
• Container log viewer with search highlighting
• Builder, kernel and system property management
• Menu bar integration

Browse, pull, and delete container images. Search Docker Hub directly from the app and inspect image metadata without dropping to the CLI.

Stream logs from multiple containers side by side. Split panes, filter by text, and use per-container colour coding to keep output readable when debugging across services.

Monitor live CPU, memory, and network usage for running containers. Sortable columns and persistent preferences make it easy to spot resource hotspots at a glance.

How Orchard compares

Orchard isn’t the only way to work with Apple’s container runtime:

	Orchard	Podman Desktop	The container CLI
Purpose-built for apple/container	✅	➖ via an extension	✅
Native macOS app	✅ Swift / SwiftUI	❌ Electron	-
Signed & notarized	✅	✅	✅
Multi-pane log viewer	✅	➖	➖ terminal only
Live container stats (CPU/mem/net/disk)	✅	✅	➖
Network, DNS & builder management	✅	➖	✅
Focused, lightweight footprint	✅	❌ general-purpose	✅
Open source (MIT)	✅	✅ (Apache-2.0)	✅ (Apache-2.0)

Orchard is the native, purpose-built choice: a lightweight Swift app focused solely on giving Apple’s container a first-class desktop experience, rather than a heavyweight cross-platform tool that supports it as one runtime among many. (Note: Docker Desktop is a separate container runtime and doesn’t manage apple/container.)

Requirements

• macOS 26 (Tahoe)
• Xcode 26 / Swift 6.2 (for building from source)
• Apple Container installed - follow the instructions here

Architecture

Orchard communicates with the container daemon primarily through the ContainerAPIClient Swift library (from apple/container) over XPC. This provides typed Swift APIs for container, image, network, and system operations without shelling out to the CLI.

A small number of operations (system start/stop, builders, DNS domain management, system properties) still use the container CLI binary via Foundation.Process, as these are not yet exposed through the XPC API.

Installation

You can install Orchard via homebrew or via a prebuilt release package. You can also download the source and build it yourself!

Every release is code-signed with a registered Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it installs and launches cleanly with no Gatekeeper “unidentified developer” warning.

Homebrew

brew install orchard

Release download

1. Download the latest release from GitHub Releases
2. Open the .dmg file and drag Orchard to your Applications folder
3. Launch Orchard from the Apps directory

Build from Source

git clone https://github.com/andrew-waters/orchard.git
cd orchard
open Orchard.xcodeproj

The project uses Swift Package Manager for dependencies. Xcode will resolve the apple/container package automatically on first build.

Adoption

Orchard is installed hundreds of times a month via Homebrew - see the live install stats - and has been starred by engineers from Apple, Microsoft, GitHub, Red Hat, Amazon, MongoDB, Tencent and across the wider cloud-native community.

Using Orchard at your company or in your day-to-day workflow? We’d love to hear about it - add yourself to ADOPTERS.md with a quick pull request.

Star History

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License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

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