Apple Container

Overview

Apple Container is a native container platform for macOS that runs Linux containers as lightweight virtual machines. It should be used instead of Docker on macOS with Apple silicon.

The container CLI is installed and available. It produces and consumes OCI-compatible container images, so images work with any standard container registry.

Requirements

• Mac with Apple silicon
• macOS 26 or later

Quick Start

# Start the system service (required once)
container system start