iContainer

!Platform: macOS 26+ !Built with SwiftUI !Vibe-coded with Claude Code

A native macOS app to manage Apple Container workloads — containers, images, logs, stats, and an interactive shell — built with SwiftUI on top of the official container CLI.

Features

• AI log analysis, on-device 🧠 — one Explain click on any container's or machine's Logs tab turns raw output into a concise diagnostic: a health summary, the errors/warnings it found (quoted), the likely cause, and concrete next steps — streamed live. Powered by Apple's Foundation Models, so the model runs entirely on your Mac: your logs (with their secrets, tokens and connection strings) never leave the device — no cloud, no API keys, no subscription. Requires Apple Intelligence on a supported Mac.
• Dashboard — container, machine, and image counts at a glance, quick actions (create container/machine, pull image), and a two-column overview of available containers and machines.
• Container lifecycle — create (from an image or a Dockerfile build), start, stop, restart, edit settings (ports, volumes, environment), delete. Editing recreates the container with the new configuration.
• Container machines — manage the Linux VMs that host containers (WWDC 2026): create, start/stop, edit (CPUs, memory, home mount), delete, with Info / Shell / Logs tabs per machine.
• Sidebar — reorderable Containers / Machines / Images sections (order, expand state, and filters persist), running/stopped sorting, search, and status filters; live status indicators.
• Per-container detail tabs — Info (network, mounts, DNS, env, exposed-port browser links), Stats with charts, persistent Shell session, Logs with follow mode.
• Images — list, pull, inspect, delete; registry login with guided error handling for auth failures.
• Networks & Volumes — sidebar sections for the service's networks (subnet, attached containers) and volumes (capacity, mounting containers, backing file), with create, delete (blocked while in use, with the reason) and prune.
• Apple container service — start/stop the system service; view CLI vs service version, host info, paths, storage (container system df), the service defaults (config.toml), service-wide stats, and live system logs.
• Docker interop 🐳 — import images from a local Docker installation (docker save → container image load, no registry round-trip) and create a container from an existing Docker container: iContainer reads its docker inspect configuration, translates ports, mounts, environment, entrypoint/command, user, resources and network for Apple Container, and lists anything that has no equivalent before you confirm. Docker is never modified.
• Docker Compose (MVP) — open a compose.yaml / docker-compose.yml, review the services it can run and the directives it can't map, then Up / Down the project on a shared per-project network in depends_on order.
• One-click Apple container CLI updates — when a new container CLI is released, Update Now downloads the signed Apple package, verifies its signature and notarization, stops the service, installs it through macOS's own administrator prompt (the app never sees your password) and starts the service again. Homebrew installs are upgraded with brew.
• Automatic updates — iContainer keeps itself up to date via Sparkle: it checks in the background and installs new versions in place (with your confirmation and the release notes), verified by signature. It also notifies you when a newer release of the container CLI is available.
• Notifications — optional system notifications when a container stops or an action fails.
• Settings — theme, launch at login, auto-start service, quit behavior, polling cadence, confirmation dialogs, default shell, terminal font, custom CLI path, default registry.
• Menu bar extra — control containers and machines and the service without opening the main window.
• Keyboard shortcuts — full menu bar command set (⌘N new container, ⇧⌘P pull image, ⌘1–⌘4 detail tabs, and more).

Requirements

• macOS 26 or later (Apple silicon)
• Apple Container CLI installed
• Apple Intelligence enabled (optional) — only needed for the on-device AI log analysis; everything else works without it
• Docker Desktop or a docker CLI (optional) — only needed to import images / clone containers from Docker
• A DNS domain configured for the container service (optional) — needed for containers to reach each other by name (compose services, cloned Docker stacks): add [dns] / domain = "test" to ~/.config/container/config.toml, restart the service, then sudo container system dns create test once. The app tells you when it's missing.

Getting started

1. Install the Apple Container CLI: download the latest .pkg from the

1. Download the latest iContainer .dmg from

1. Start the container service from the app — everything else flows from there.

iContainer updates itself via Sparkle: it checks for new versions in the background and, when one is available, shows a prompt with the release notes and installs the update in place once you confirm. Updates are verified against a built-in signature and only install if signed by the maintainer. You can also trigger a check on demand from the iContainer ▸ Check for Updates… menu item.

First launch — release builds are signed with a Developer ID

certificate and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens the app without a

Gatekeeper warning. (Builds up to and including 2.1.1 were unnotarized; if

you're on one of those, right-click the app → Open once, or run

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/iContainer.app.)

Install via Homebrew

A dedicated Homebrew tap is the easiest way to keep iContainer up to date without re-authorising the bundle on every release — Homebrew strips the quarantine flag automatically, which sidesteps the Gatekeeper warning above.

brew tap nico81/icontainer
brew install --cask icontainer
Later, to upgrade to the newest release:
brew upgrade --cask icontainer

Recent Homebrew versions ask you to trust casks from third-party taps. If

the install stops with "Refusing to load cask … from untrusted tap", run

brew trust nico81/icontainer (as the error suggests) and re-run the

install.

The tap lives at nico81/homebrew-icontainer; the canonical copy of the cask formula is vendored here as Casks/icontainer.rb and mirrored to the tap on each release.

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/nico81/iContainer.git
cd iContainer
open iContainer.xcodeproj

Then build and run the iContainer scheme in Xcode. You will need to set your own development team in Signing & Capabilities. From the command line:

xcodebuild -project iContainer.xcodeproj -scheme iContainer -configuration Debug build

Unit tests cover the CLI-output parsing layer:

xcodebuild -project iContainer.xcodeproj -scheme iContainer -testPlan iContainer test

Documentation

• CHANGELOG.md — release history
• docs/PROJECT_CONTEXT.md — architecture and component map
• docs/UI_UX_GUIDELINES.md — UI/UX conventions
• docs/VERSIONING.md — release workflow

Built with vibes 🤖

Full disclosure: iContainer was vibe-coded — designed and written hand-in-hand with Claude Code. The ideas, the direction, and every "no, not like that" are human; a lot of the typing isn't. It ships with unit tests and gets manually run on each change, but it's a hobby project built for fun on top of brand-new Apple tech — so read the code, kick the tires, and don't run it anywhere you'd cry about. PRs and issues very welcome.

If it saves you some clicks, you can buy me a coffee ☕ — entirely optional, always appreciated.

License

MIT