Orchard

Orchard is an orchestration system for Tart.

Create a cluster of bare-metal Apple Silicon machines and manage dozens of VMs with ease!

Quick start

Start the Orchard in local development mode:

brew install cirruslabs/cli/orchard
orchard dev

This will start Orchard Controller and a single Orchard Worker on your local machine. For production deployments, please refer to the Deployment Guide.

Creating Virtual Machines

Create a Virtual Machine resource:

orchard create vm --image ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-ventura-base:latest ventura-base

Check a list of VM resources to see if the Virtual Machine we've created above is already running:

orchard list vms

Accessing Virtual Machines

SSH

To SSH into a VM use the orchard ssh command:

orchard ssh vm ventura-base

You can specify the --username and --password flags to specify the username/password pair to SSH. By default, admin/admin is used.

You can also execute remote commands instead of spawning a login shell, similarly to the OpenSSH's ssh command:

orchard ssh vm ventura-base "uname -a"

You can execute scripts remotely this way, by telling the remote command-line interpreter to read from the standard input and using the redirection operator as follows:

orchard ssh vm ventura-base "bash -s" < script.sh

VNC

Similar to ssh command, you can use vnc command to open Screen Sharing into a remote VM:

orchard vnc vm --username=administrator --password=password101 ventura-base

From architecture perspective, Orchard has a lower level API for port forwarding that ssh and vnc commands are built on top of. All port forwarding connections are done via the Orchard Controller instance which "proxies" a secure connection to the Orchard Workers. Therefore, your workers can be located under a stricter firewall that only allows connections to the Orchard Controller instance. Orchard Controller instance is secured by default and all API calls are authenticated and authorized.