Create a MacOS Tahoe VM with tart

The Mac command line tool tart continues to offer one of the simplest and fastest ways to setup a new virtual machine, and setting up a Tahoe VM is no exception. Whether you’re a developer, tinkerer, tester, or just someone who wants to give the latest MacOS Tahoe 26 operating system a trial run without committing to it as their primary MacOS operating system, the tart command offers a remarkably fast way to setup a virtualized MacOS Tahoe installation. Performance with tart is impressive too, thanks to using Apple’s bunded Hypervisor framework, so as long as you have an Apple Silicon Mac, you’ll be able to take advantage of MacOS virtualization like what we’ll cover here for getting a MacOS Tahoe 26 tart VM up and running in short order.

You’ll want some familiarity with the command line, since tart is installed and operated through the Terminal, but the actual Tahoe VM itself will be running in a window atop your existing MacOS installation.

System Requirements

• Mac with Apple Silicon procssor
• At least 40GB of free disk space
• Homebrew installed (use this guide if you need to install it on your Mac)

Again, you will need some comfort with the command line as well, since the entire process of setting up and interacting with the virtual machine is through Terminal. If the command line isn’t your thing, try using UTM instead which is entirely GUI based.

If you already have tart installed you can skip the first part of the tutorial. We’re using Homebrew because it’s the easiest and most ubiquitous package manager for the Mac command line.

How to Create MacOS Tahoe 26 VM with tart

Getting a MacOS Tahoe VM up and running with tart is super simple and it’ll be up and running very quickly:

1. If you need to install tart, issue the following Homebrew comand (here’s how to install that):

brew install cirruslabs/cli/tart

2. After brew finishes installing tart, you can clone a MacOS Tahoe virtual machine that is preconfigured with the following command:

tart clone ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-tahoe-base:latest tahoe-vm

(If that command does not work for whatever reason, try this one:)

tart clone ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-tahoe:latest tahoe-vm

3. When that finishes downloading the MacOS Tahoe VM, issue the following command to run the Tahoe VM:

tart run tahoe-vm


4. In a moment you will see a new window with MacOS Tahoe booting up



5. You’ll now be running MacOS Tahoe in a virtual machine:



6. The default login and password for the MacOS Tahoe 26 vm is admin/admin

Again, the default tart user name and password is admin / admin.

Soon you’ll be running MacOS Tahoe in a VM, it’s just like a physical Mac except it’s running in a virtualized environment, you could think of it kind of like a computer running as an application on another a computer. Anyway, you can tinker, play around, run the OS.
A window will appear with macOS Tahoe starting up — just like on a physical Mac. Go through setup as you normally would.

You can install system updates inside the macOS Tahoe VM just like installing any other system software update as well:

Tart allows you to run many versions of MacOS virtualized, including MacOS Tahoe 26, MacOS Sequoia 15, macOS Sonoma 14, macOS Monterey 13, MacOS Ventura 12, and even linux and other operating systems too. The process is super simple, just change the repository URL to what you’re looking to run. For example, for Sequoia:

tart clone ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-sequoia-vanilla:15.7 sequoia

Or for Tahoe:

tart clone ghcr.io/cirruslabs/macos-tahoe-vanilla:26.0 tahoe26

As you can see, you’ll want to specify the OS name, version, and give the VM a name, which you then run with the ‘tart run vmname’ command.

Of course we’re focusing on Tahoe here, but you can play around and tinker with other MacOS versions and Linux as well as you see fit.

The tart app takes much of the setup hassle and frustration out of the typical VM creation process, making it ultra fast and straight forward. Whether you’re a developer testing apps or web projects, or just a tinkerer, or someone who wants to explore Tahoe before committing to it and installing as your primary MacOS version, this approach offers a safe and convenient way to try out the MacOS Tahoe experience. Give it a go, see what you think!

Have you tried tart to virtualize macOS yet? Or are you running macOS Tahoe as your operating system or are you sticking with a prior version of MacOS? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!