Caker is a modern toolchain for building and managing virtual machines with the Virtualization framework, focused on simplicity and developer experience.
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
- 📖 GitHub Pages: https://caker.aldunelabs.com - Complete documentation with navigation and search
- 📚 Local wiki: wiki/home.md - Source wiki files
The documentation is automatically synchronized from the wiki/ directory to GitHub Pages when changes are pushed to the main branch.
caked is the core daemon process that handles virtual machine lifecycle management, including building, running, and orchestrating virtual machines with configuration-driven workflows.
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 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.
Its main role is to:
- Create and configure virtual machines from macOS
- Start, stop, and monitor virtual machine instances
- Embed and run standalone virtual machines directly in
Caker.app - Offer a VNC frontend to view virtual machine displays
- Expose logs, status, and diagnostics in an accessible UI
- Integrate with the local daemon and CLI tooling without requiring manual low-level setup
caked can run as a launchd background service on macOS to run virtual machine workloads. It handles the core execution and management of virtual machines, including:
- Virtual Machine Lifecycle Management: Starting, stopping, and monitoring running virtual machines
- Resource Allocation: Managing CPU, memory, and storage resources for virtual machines
- Service Registration: Registering virtual machines as system services for persistent operation
- Health Monitoring: Continuously checking virtual machine health status and auto-recovery
- Logging and Diagnostics: Collecting and streaming virtual machine logs and diagnostic information
Working in conjunction with cakectl, the command-line control interface, caked provides the backend daemon that executes administrative commands and maintains the operational state of all managed virtual machines.
Together, caked and cakectl form a powerful system for virtual machine development and deployment.
Please report vulnerabilities responsibly using the project's security policy:
Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a pull request or open an issue to report bugs or suggest enhancements.
- Contributor guide: CONTRIBUTING.md
- CI workflow policy (no PR-triggered actions): CONTRIBUTING.md#ci-workflow-policy