Silcrate

The native Mac home for Apple containers.

A calm, precise macOS GUI for Apple's open-source container CLI — containers, Linux machines, images, volumes and networks, all without Docker Desktop.

Download the latest release · silcrate.com

What it is

Apple quietly shipped a real container engine for macOS: every container runs in its own lightweight VM on the Virtualization framework, in Swift, optimized for Apple silicon. Silcrate is its native Mac home — SwiftUI throughout, no Electron, and a hard rule inherited from day one: every number on screen is real engine data.

Docker is the incumbent, OrbStack the fast one, Podman the daemonless one — Silcrate is the native one.

Highlights

• Containers — full lifecycle, single and bulk, with partial-failure reporting; exhaustive inspect views; an in-app shell on a real PTY; instant search everywhere
• Live stats — CPU, memory, network and block I/O streamed from the engine, per container and fleet-wide, in 1m–1h windows
• Create without flags — the whole create surface as a form: registry autocomplete, resources, env, networks, ports, mounts, capabilities, Rosetta, labels
• Machines — persistent Linux environments that boot the image's own init and map your home directory in: edit on the Mac, build inside Linux
• Images — pull with platform selection, build with BuildKit, inspect decoded OCI config and layers
• Networks — NAT or host-only, IPv4/IPv6 subnets, delete guards
• Menu bar mode — service toggle, live per-container CPU/memory, logs, shell, stop
• Your terminal — open a shell in Terminal, iTerm2, Warp, Ghostty, WezTerm or kitty

About this repository

This repository is Silcrate's release home: signed .dmg builds, checksums and the Sparkle update feed (appcast.xml). Silcrate itself is closed source — the app's source is not published here. The open-source part is Apple's container runtime, which Silcrate drives.

Issues are open, and bug reports and feature requests belong here.

Requirements

• macOS 26 or later, Apple silicon (nested virtualization additionally needs M3+)
• Each Silcrate release is built for and pinned to one container CLI release for compatibility — currently 1.1.0

Install

1. Download the .dmg from the latest release
2. Open it and drag Silcrate to Applications

The app is signed and notarized; no account needed. To verify a download, grab the matching .sha256 asset and run:

shasum -a 256 -c Silcrate-<version>.dmg.sha256

Updates are built in: Silcrate checks the signed Sparkle feed hosted in this repository (appcast.xml) and updates in place.

Beta

Silcrate is in public beta — expect rough edges, and please report them. The app is free and the free features stay free; an optional Premium tier for the background-service features arrives later, and beta testers will get a discount on it. See the roadmap for what's landing next, free and Premium.

Privacy

Diagnostics are opt-out. Logs are scrubbed of secrets on-device before anything is written or attached. Crash reports are anonymized. No account system, no server of its own. Details: silcrate.com/privacy

Feedback

Found a bug, or want to shape the beta? Open an issue or write to feedback@silcrate.com — there's also Send Feedback right inside the app.

---

© 2026 Niosoft EOOD, trading as Keenhatch · Built by Dionysios Karatzas