Hi Product Hunt 👋

I built Silcrate because Apple shipped something interesting and under-used: an open-source container runtime for Apple silicon that runs Linux containers as lightweight VMs. It’s a genuinely good engine, and it’s CLI-only.

Silcrate is the Mac-native front end for it. Lifecycle management with bulk operations, persistent Linux machines, BuildKit builds, Docker Hub search, volumes and networks, live log streaming, embedded PTY shells, and real-time telemetry streamed from the engine into native charts.

It’s SwiftUI throughout, so it behaves like a Mac app — light and dark, menu bar, keyboard-driven, no Electron.

You don’t need to set the runtime up by hand. First launch walks you through it — Silcrate checks for Apple’s container CLI, the kernel and the background service, and installs or updates whatever’s missing for you. If you’d rather not install anything yet, there’s a demo mode that renders every screen with no runtime at all.

Being straight about two things:

• It needs macOS 26 on Apple silicon, and nested virtualization needs M3 or newer. That’s an Apple engine constraint, not a choice I made.
• Silcrate is closed source. The GitHub repo hosts signed releases and the update feed, not the app source. Apple’s container runtime is the open-source part.

The app is free and the free features stay free. A premium tier is planned for later — background service, auto-restart, crash alerts, backup/restore — as an optional add-on on top of it.

I’ll be here all day. I’d most like to hear from people already running containers on a Mac: what’s missing?