Virt Manager Modern

A native macOS app for managing remote QEMU/KVM servers over libvirt — a Mac-native alternative to the GTK virt-manager. Connect over qemu+ssh, browse your VMs with live state, create and delete machines, edit their hardware with real forms (no XML), and open SPICE or VNC consoles rendered natively in the window.

Console (SPICE, SSH-tunnelled)	Hardware manager	New VM wizard

Serial console (headless VMs)	Snapshots

Host detail — Info / Storage / Networks	Guest port forwarding

Why

Running the original virt-manager on macOS is a rough ride: it's a GTK app glued on with Homebrew, so you get non-native menus and shortcuts, blurry HiDPI rendering, sluggish remote consoles, and a dependency stack that breaks on the next brew upgrade. It works — barely — but it never feels like a Mac app, because it isn't one.

This project is that itch, scratched: a from-scratch SwiftUI client for the same libvirt/QEMU hosts, with consoles, hardware editing, snapshots, and storage handled natively.

Compared to original virt-manager

Where this app is better on a Mac:

• Native SwiftUI app — real macOS toolbar, shortcuts, trackpad, Retina rendering; no GTK/XQuartz anywhere in the stack.
• Self-contained .app: every library is built from pinned upstream sources and bundled. No Homebrew at runtime, nothing to break on a system update.
• SSH tunnels for SPICE/VNC are created automatically per console.
• Guest port forwarding: tunnel any guest TCP port to localhost over SSH, with one-click SSH to guest (Terminal via ProxyJump) and Open in browser — reachable even on a private libvirt network.
• Quality-of-life extras virt-manager lacks: ISO upload from your Mac over libvirt streams (no scp), guest IPs with one-click copy, live CPU/memory stats in the VM list, VM search/filter, keyboard shortcuts for lifecycle actions, guard rails in hardware editing (controllers in use can't be removed, duplicate singletons can't be added), automatic installer ISO eject on power actions, host dashboard with live memory stats, storage/network managers, managed save, and VM screenshots.

Where original virt-manager still wins:

• Maturity: ~20 years of edge cases; this app is young.
• Breadth: migration between hosts, multiple hypervisor drivers (Xen, LXC, …), unattended installs backed by the full libosinfo database (this app ships a curated OS catalog and is QEMU/KVM + single-host focused).
• Cross-platform and packaged by every Linux distribution; this app is macOS-14+/Apple-Silicon only.

About this project

This entire application — the Swift/SwiftUI code, the C interop shims for libvirt and spice-gtk, the from-source dependency build system, the docs, and the screenshots — was built end-to-end by Anthropic's Claude (Fable 5) working as a coding agent, in conversation with a human who steered, tested against real hardware, and reviewed. It stands as a demonstration of what current Claude models can build autonomously: a working native client speaking a 20-year-old C virtualization API, with its own reproducible toolchain.

Features

• Connections to remote libvirt over qemu+ssh:// (SSH keys / ssh-agent), managed in a virt-manager-style add/edit dialog with autoconnect.
• VM list in a native sidebar with live status, plus full lifecycle: start, graceful shutdown, reboot, force off, pause/resume, managed save (hibernate to disk with Restore on next start).
• New VM wizard with a guest-OS catalog (the role libosinfo plays in legacy virt-manager): picking e.g. Ubuntu 24.04 or Windows 11 pre-fills recommended CPU/RAM/disk and tunes devices — virtio vs SATA/e1000e, Hyper-V enlightenments + localtime clock for Windows, TPM 2.0 + forced UEFI for Windows 11.
• Hardware manager: schema-driven forms for ~20 device types (disks, NICs, graphics, controllers, host USB/PCI passthrough, TPM, …) with host- populated pickers (virtual networks, storage volumes, node devices). Add Hardware knows what's addable (singleton devices, SPICE-dependent devices); Remove knows what's removable (controllers in use are blocked, removing the boot disk warns). Edits stage into a working copy and apply via defineXML. Config drift detection when the running VM differs from the saved definition — diff sheet, revert running to saved for hot-plug changes, and warnings before shutdown/reboot/save/force-off.
• Delete VM flow with per-file storage cleanup checkboxes, force-off for running VMs, and full metadata cleanup (UEFI NVRAM, managed save, snapshots).
• SPICE and VNC consoles, both tunnelled automatically over SSH and rendered natively (no GTK). Detach to a separate window with fullscreen. Clipboard sharing for SPICE (UTF-8) and VNC (RoyalVNCKit redirection), SPICE audio, and a multi-monitor picker when the guest exposes more than one display — all toggled in Settings (⌘,). The Console tab picks the right protocol from the VM's <graphics> device — and falls back to a real serial console (terminal emulator over virDomainOpenConsole) for headless VMs. CD-ROM media can be ejected live; power actions auto-eject installers so they don't boot again.
• Live stats & guest IPs: CPU%, memory, aggregate block/disk and network I/O, and per-device disk & NIC throughput per running VM in the sidebar and Overview (event-driven VM list, stats polled every 5s), plus rolling history graphs (CPU, memory, disk and network I/O over the last ~10 minutes) on the Overview tab; guest IP addresses (guest agent or DHCP leases) with one-click copy; QEMU guest agent status badge on Overview.
• VM screenshots on the Overview tab (virDomainScreenshot), auto-refresh every 30s while running, with Save to disk.
• Host detail view: select a connection in the sidebar (it shows live memory use and VM counts) to open a tabbed host view — Info / Storage / Networks — the same way VMs open their own tabs:
  • Info: CPU model, installed memory, live memory use, VM counts, libvirt version.
  • Storage: start/stop/rescan pools; create, resize, wipe, and delete volumes; lists refresh on libvirt storage-pool events.
  • Networks: list/start/stop/delete networks; XML editor for custom definitions; one-click default NAT network setup.
• Snapshots: create (incl. memory while running), revert, delete — shown as a tree with the current marker.
• Clone VM with per-disk Clone/Share/Skip, and ISO upload from the Mac straight into a host storage pool (libvirt streams — no scp).
• Live hotplug: attach disks/NICs/USB devices to running VMs, detach them live, and resize vCPUs/memory without a restart.
• Preferences (⌘,): default detail tab, SPICE/VNC clipboard, and SPICE audio toggles.

Requirements

• macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon
• Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) and network access — nothing else: no Homebrew, no pre-installed libraries
• A libvirt/QEMU host reachable over SSH (key/agent auth) — or none at all if you just want to poke the UI (make run-dev includes libvirt's built-in test:///default driver)

Build & run

git clone <this repo> && cd virt-manager-modern
make            # first run builds all C dependencies from source (~10 min), then the app
make run        # open VirtManagerModern.app
make run-dev    # same + built-in test driver (no server needed)
swift test      # unit tests

Every C dependency (libvirt, glib, spice-client-glib, OpenSSL, gnutls, gstreamer, …) is compiled from pinned upstream release tarballs into third_party/ and embedded into the .app, which therefore runs on any Apple Silicon Mac without dependencies. See docs/BUILDING.md for the details (and for bumping dependency versions).

Distribution (Developer ID + notarization)

Local builds are ad-hoc signed (make / make app). For a Gatekeeper- friendly release zip, use the signing script once you have an Apple Developer account, a Developer ID Application certificate, and notary credentials:

# One-time: store notary credentials (or set NOTARY_API_KEY / _KEY_ID / _ISSUER_ID)
xcrun notarytool store-credentials AC_NOTARY \
  --apple-id YOU@EMAIL --team-id TEAMID --password APP-SPECIFIC-PASSWORD

make sign       # Developer ID sign + verify (no notarization)
make release    # sign → notarize → staple → dist/VirtManagerModern-<version>.zip

Bundle ID: com.muanton.virtmanagermodern. App version is in VERSION (synced into the bundle on make app; bump with make bump-patch / bump-minor / bump-major — see CONTRIBUTING.md). See Scripts/sign-and-notarize.sh for environment overrides and --sign-only usage.

Architecture

Module	Responsibility
CLibvirt / CSpice	System-library modules mapping the self-built libvirt / spice-client-glib headers via pkg-config.
LibvirtKit	Swift wrappers over libvirt: connections, domain state, lifecycle, XML, storage, node devices. Blocking calls serialized off-main, exposed as async.
DomainModel	Parses/edits libvirt domain XML into typed values: device schemas, add/remove rules, guest-OS catalog, New VM template.
ConsoleKit	SSH port-forward tunnel + VNC session (RoyalVNCKit), exposing a live framebuffer NSView.
SpiceShim / SpiceKit	Small C shim hiding spice-gtk's GLib machinery (one shared GLib loop thread for all sessions) + Swift wrapper and AppKit renderer.
App	SwiftUI: sidebar, lifecycle toolbar, Overview/Console/Hardware tabs, wizards and sheets.

Status & limitations

• VNC and SPICE consoles (scaled-to-fit, full keyboard/mouse, detach window). Clipboard for both protocols (Settings to disable). SPICE audio and multi-monitor display selection are supported; no RDP yet.
• virtio-gpu GL scanout (<gl enable='yes'> on the graphics device) cannot render in the native console over a remote SPICE tunnel (no EGL/DMA-BUF on macOS). The Console tab warns and offers one-click disable; new VMs default to <gl enable='no'/>.
• Screenshots require a running VM with a graphics device; format is hypervisor-specific (usually PNG on QEMU/KVM).
• Local builds are ad-hoc signed: on another Mac, right-click → Open the first time. Use make release for a notarized build (see Distribution above); pre-built release downloads are not published yet.
• arm64 only (the dependency build targets Apple Silicon).
• Not sandboxed (spawns ssh for tunnels and the qemu+ssh transport).

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 — see LICENSE. There are no per-file headers; the root license governs.

The bundled third-party libraries are built from unmodified upstream sources and dynamically linked; each keeps its own license (LGPL: libvirt, GLib, spice-client-glib, gstreamer, gnutls, proxy-libintl, json-glib; Apache-2.0: OpenSSL; BSD: pcre2, spice-protocol; MIT: pixman; IJG: libjpeg; LGPL/GPL dual: gmp, nettle). RoyalVNCKit is MIT-licensed.