container/BUILDING.md

Building the project

To build the container project, you need:

• Mac with Apple silicon
• macOS 15 minimum, macOS 26 recommended
• Xcode 26, set as the active developer directory

Important

There is a bug in the vmnet framework on macOS 26 that causes network creation to fail if the container helper applications are located under your Documents or Desktop directories. If you use make install, you can simply run the container binary in /usr/local. If you prefer to use the binaries that make all creates in your project bin and libexec directories, locate your project elsewhere, such as ~/projects/container, until this issue is resolved.

Compile and test

Build container and the background services from source, and run basic and integration tests:

make all test integration

Copy the binaries to /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/libexec (requires entering an administrator password):

make install

Or to install a release build, with better performance than the debug build:

BUILD_CONFIGURATION=release make all test integration
BUILD_CONFIGURATION=release make install

Compile protobufs

container uses gRPC to communicate to the builder virtual machine that creates images from Dockerfiles, and depends on specific versions of grpc-swift and swift-protobuf. If you make changes to the gRPC APIs in the container-builder-shim project, install the tools and re-generate the gRPC code in this project using:

make protos

Develop using a local copy of Containerization

To make changes to container that require changes to the Containerization project, or vice versa:

1. Clone the Containerization repository such that it sits next to your clone of the container repository. Ensure that you follow containerization instructions to prepare your build environment.

2. In your development shell, go to the container project directory.

   cd container
   

3. If the container services are already running, stop them.

   bin/container system stop
   

4. Use the Swift package manager to configure use your local containerization package and update your Package.resolved file.

   /usr/bin/swift package edit --path ../containerization containerization
   /usr/bin/swift package update containerization
   

   Important

   If you are using Xcode, you will need to temporarily modify Package.swift instead of using swift package edit, using a path dependency in place of the versioned container dependency:

   .package(path: "../containerization"),
   

5. Build container.

   make clean all
   

6. Restart the container services.

   bin/container system stop
   bin/container system start
   

To revert to using the Containerization dependency from your Package.swift:

1. Use the Swift package manager to restore the normal containerization dependency and update your Package.resolved file. If you are using Xcode, revert your Package.swift change instead of using swift package unedit.

   /usr/bin/swift package unedit containerization
   /usr/bin/swift package update containerization
   

2. Rebuild container.

   make clean all
   

3. Restart the container services.

   bin/container system stop
   bin/container system start