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Show HN: Local-First Linux MicroVMs for macOS
Shuru is a lightweight sandbox that spins up Linux VMs on macOS using Apple's Virtualization.framework. Boots in about a second on Apple Silicon, and everything is ephemeral by default. There's a checkpoint system for when you do want to persist state, and sandboxes run without network access unless you explicitly allow it.
Single Rust binary, no dependencies.
Built it for sandboxing AI agent code execution, but it works well for anything where you need a disposable Linux environment.
- xrd 7mo agoWhat is the benefit of this over lima, for example?
- harshdoesdev 7mo agoLima can do a lot of what shuru does if you set it up for it. the difference is mostly in defaults and how much you have to configure upfront. with shuru you get ephemeral VMs, no networking, and a clean rootfs on every run without touching a config file. shuru run and you're in. Checkpoints and branching are built into the CLI rather than being an experimental feature you have to figure out. Lima is a much bigger and more mature project though. Shuru is something I am building partly to learn and partly because I wanted something with saner defaults for this specific use case.
- enneff 7mo agoThanks for doing this. I had basically the same experience with Lima. It is very nice but the defaults are not what I want, and I don't like having to wonder whether I turned off the stuff that I don't want enabled. Better that everything is disabled by default and I selectively turn things on (like networking) as I need them. I'm gonna give shuru a try. My main concern is being based on Alpine (seemingly the only option?) I may not be able to easily pull in the dependencies for the projects I'm working on, but I'll see how it goes.
- harshdoesdev 7mo agoglad to hear it, that's exactly the thinking behind it. alpine is the only option right now yeah. what kind of dependencies are you running into issues with? would help me figure out what to prioritize next.
- enneff 7mo agoI haven't yet - just generally I have found it a bit of a hassle to figure out which packages to install whenever I use a different distro. I'll let you know how it goes!
- halostatue 7mo agoDisclaimer: I haven't tried this yet. I would want the equivalent of the trixie-slim Docker image (Debian 13, no documentation). It's ~46 Mb instead of ~4Mb as a Docker image, but gives a reasonably familiar interface. (This is largely based on some odd experiences with Elixir on Alpine, which is where I am doing most of my work these days.)
- 7777777phil 7mo agoThe agent stack is splitting into specialized layers and sandboxing is clearly becoming its own thing. Shuru, E2B, Modal, Firecracker wrappers. Earlier this month I wrote about how these layers have very different defensibility profiles and why going monolithic is the wrong call: https://philippdubach.com/posts/dont-go-monolithic-the-agent-stack-is-stratifying/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/dont-go-monolithic-the-agent... EDIT: Spelling
- camkego 7mo agoIt's a good article and seems to mirror my experience doing partial-AI software development. If you are not saving your context for decision making and your conclusions in software architecture (as made between developers and AI) you are losing very valuable context information on software design. Although I'm not sure the article ties closely to the topic of micro VMs.
- josephg 7mo agoWhat does local first mean in this context? Does it just mean local? Like, the software runs locally?
- harshdoesdev 7mo agoyeah, it just means everything runs on your machine. there are services like E2B, sprites.dev and others that give you sandboxes in the cloud. shuru runs VMs locally using Apple's Virtualization.framework, so nothing leaves your Mac.
- userbinator 7mo agoUnfortunately yes. It's just another stupid marketing buzzword these days.
- Xlab 7mo agoit's the other way around, everything is in the cloud now (upload your files to us, we are privacy respecting, bla bla) So it's good that the product actually highlights it is dealing with local hardware only.
- userbinator 7mo agoI don't expect "Linux MicroVMs for macOS" to have anything to do with clouds.
- josephg 7mo agoYes, but we have a perfectly serviceable term for local software already: "local software". To me, "local-first software" means something slightly different. The term was coined by this essay[1], which says: > Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices > This means that while local-first apps keep their data in local storage on each device, it is also necessary for that data to be synchronized across all of the devices on which a user does their work. But this is clearly not what's going on here. This project is just local software, like we've had forever. If a fancy new "local first" buzzword makes local-only software seem more sexy, then I suppose I don't want to get too mad about it. I really like local software. But the autist in me likes it when technical terms have a well defined meaning. [1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/
- Krisso 7mo agoWhy was using straigt containers not enough?
- harshdoesdev 7mo agocontainers work fine for a lot of this. shuru is just what felt more natural to me. less config overhead and i wanted to learn by building it.
- wickrom 7mo agoWhat would you say are a natural use case for Shuru or Lima vs say a full docker like environment? What does the sandbox allow you to do differently? There's additional overhead of the hypervisor. I'm mostly just trying to learn, as yourself.
- nsonha 7mo agoinstalling new tools inside container requires you to update the Dockerfile and rebuild, here it seems you can simply run the installation command and create a checkpoint
- fulafel 7mo agoYou can do this with Docker too without Dockerfile or rebuilding. You can treat the container as mutable and just start/stop it, doing changes manually, and make snapshots with docker commit. You'll forfeit the benefits of reproducible scripted environment of course but Docker does let you do it.
- conradev 7mo agoUse OrbStack. It’s faster than Virtualization.framework because it has its own hypervisor.
- harshdoesdev 7mo agoOrbStack is great but it is solving a different problem. it's a full Docker Desktop replacement. shuru is just a thin layer over Virtualization.framework for spinning up throwaway sandboxes.
- noname120 7mo agoNot true, OrbStack uses Virtualization.framework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36189550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36189550
- saagarjha 7mo agoI don't think they use Virtualization for most launches now
- noname120 7mo agoI think you are right, I’m not sure that they actually use it for stuff that doesn’t require Rosetta (arm64 stuff)
- nsonha 7mo agoYes but they also use a custom linux kernel to achieve better performance than plain vz. I'm not technical enough to tell if it's bs, but it boots subsecond
- JoshTriplett 7mo agoOrbStack has some invasive elements inside it trying to provide filesystem integration, and the filesystem they use is not POSIX compliant and causes breakage with some build systems and other software.
- rishabhaiover 7mo agoI've noticed claude forks parallel agents on an assigned task. How would they communicate in isolated sandboxes like these? Would it be cleaner and more effective for a harness to orchestrate swarms of agents in a single clean linux environment like OrbStack?
- harshdoesdev 7mo agohaven't thought about multi-agent communication yet. each sandbox is fully isolated which is the point. checkpoints help a bit here though, you can branch multiple agents from the same checkpoint so they all start from the same state.
- rishabhaiover 7mo agoI think I made a cursory and incorrect assumption. Given this is backed by Apple's Virtualization, it has POSIX compliance and forks/execs are allowed within the sandbox which can support agent parallelization within a sandbox I believe. Looks like a great project at surface!
- tobyhinloopen 7mo agoNeat! I was looking for something like this
- harshdoesdev 7mo agothanks! let me know how it goes
- okayokay123 7mo ago[dead]
- Xlab 7mo agoI will steal this to make a local-first version of https://microterm.dev https://microterm.dev for macOS :) My idea is to have unified environment across all targets, so the only thing that changes is speed and amount of RAM.
- harshdoesdev 7mo agocool, would love to see it!
- chrisweekly 7mo agoiOS Safari stuck in a redirect loop (loading... indicator reaches 90% then hard refresh, repeat till error message)
- todotask2 7mo agoOn on iPhone 13 Pro with iOS Safari 26.3, loading fine.
- chrisweekly 7mo agoMine's also a 13pro, iOS 18.7.3's Safari, still getting same error "A problem occurred repeatedly on microterm.dev"
- scosman 7mo agoHow is this running the vm/container? Cloud or something like container2wasm? Kinda cool I’m on my phone, on an alpine terminal, and genuinely need to ask if it’s running in the browser.
- scosman 7mo agochecked from desktop: WASM container!
- BrandiATMuhkuh 7mo agoVery cool. Was looking for something like this for a new project of mine. (I'm working on a project that is like a marriage of retool+OpenClaw. It's used by SME to quickly build inhouse apps)
- runako 7mo agoHow does this compare to Apple container[1]? I am excited by the innovation happening in the space! 1 - https://github.com/apple/container https://github.com/apple/container
- harshdoesdev 7mo agoapple container is more of a docker-style workflow, OCI images, registries, etc. shuru is just micro VMs with checkpointing, much simpler scope.
- janlucien 7mo ago[dead]
- praveenhm 7mo agoHow does it compare to Lume. It uses Apple's native Virtualization Framework to run macOS and Linux VMs at near-native speed on Apple Silicon.
- harshdoesdev 7mo agolume is a much more full featured VM manager, macOS and Linux VMs, API server, prebuilt images, python SDK etc. shuru is intentionally minimal.
- jclay 7mo agoHas anyone tackled this for Windows? WSL isn’t ideal when shipping a consumer app to a non-developer target audience since it requires some setup.
- JSR_FDED 7mo agoThis looks awesome. How would you recommend setting up an allowlist for external network communications (for cases where networking is enabled)?
- raihansaputra 7mo agoman this is cool. this is what i want since i read about fly.io's sprites. slightly related to this, and i'm not familiar with linux sandboxing/containerization in depth, but any similar turn key solution for linux desktop/server? ideally i have something like sprites/shuru but on my own linux/ubuntu server instead of in the cloud.
- harshdoesdev 7mo agoglad you liked it! I am currently exploring options for Linux support. will share an update soon.
- alexellisuk 7mo agoWe built SlicerVM for this in 2022, but not just for sandboxing. It's for servers + API launched VMs (i.e. what we now like to call a 'sandbox'). Feel free to take a look, a lot of our early users are saying things like this.
- joshgachnang 7mo agoSame, I really want to use sprites (for me and my whole team) but every time I try to set up, I run into weird issues. Last time I got in some state where trying to launch Claude froze the whole VM every time.
- akashkahlon 7mo agothis is awesome!!
- apatheticonion 7mo agoHow are we going for gpu acceleration in Linux VMs on MacOS?
- alexellisuk 7mo agoAFAIK that's not possible at the moment. Apple limits the full GPU acceleration for macOS guests.
- apatheticonion 7mo agoClassic Apple
- steve1977 7mo agoLet's not call this local-first please. Especially since there is no wherever- else-second. The term first makes no sense here.
- srinath693 7mo agoThe value here isn't 'local VMs'. it's that the defaults are inverted. Everything else defaults to persistent and networked. This defaults to ephemeral and isolated. Small shift, but matters when you don't trust the code that's about to run.
- scosman 7mo agoThis looks amazing. I’ve been wanting virtualization.framework micro VMs for months! Docker is fine, but the overhead isn’t ideal. I like the defaults (ephemeral, network off). Any thoughts on adding host-mapped directories? I have a MCP server for ephemeral sandboxes that supports various backends (Docker, E2B, Modal, even WASM). I’ll look at adding this. https://github.com/Kiln-AI/Kilntainers https://github.com/Kiln-AI/Kilntainers
- Cyphase 7mo agoShuru looks cool! I've been working on something with a similar vibe, for Linux hosts first; MicroVMs, default offline, etc. Not ready to release, but I'm starting to dogfood it.
- user3939382 7mo agomacos also has a native sandbox-exec that can be used to isolate processes with a policy you like. https://igorstechnoclub.com/sandbox-exec/ https://igorstechnoclub.com/sandbox-exec/
- sedawkgrep 7mo agoWow I never knew this existed. Thanks for pointing this out!
- abhikul0 7mo agoThread from yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47101200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47101200
- sedawkgrep 7mo agoWow I don't know how I missed that...
- omrimaya 7mo agoThe design decision I find most interesting here is ephemeral-by-default with opt-in checkpointing, that inversion of the usual "persist everything, clean up manually" model fits agent code execution well. Most sandboxing approaches I've seen treat isolation as the hard problem, but state leakage across runs is the subtler foot-gun when you're executing LLM-generated code repeatedly. One thing I ran into building agent infrastructure: the boundary between "sandbox that runs code" and "agent that decides what code to run" wants to be a clean HTTP interface, not a library call. Makes it easier to audit what crossed the boundary. Does Shuru expose any hook for streaming stdout back to the caller during execution, or is it strictly "wait for exit, get result"?