glad you liked it! I am currently exploring options for Linux support. will share an update soon.

lume is a much more full featured VM manager, macOS and Linux VMs, API server, prebuilt images, python SDK etc. shuru is intentionally minimal.

apple container is more of a docker-style workflow, OCI images, registries, etc. shuru is just micro VMs with checkpointing, much simpler scope.

cool, would love to see it!

thanks! let me know how it goes

haven'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.

I 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!

OrbStack 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.

containers 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.

What 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.

installing 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

yeah, 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.

Lima 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.

Thanks 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.

glad 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.

I 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!

Disclaimer: 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.)