1VMTool is a single application. There is no runtime to install alongside it, no hypervisor to download and no package manager involved.

Requirements


Mac	Apple silicon. There is no Intel build.
macOS	26 or later.
Disk	Enough for the machines you create. Disks are sparse, so they grow as the guest writes rather than up front.
Everything else	Nothing. No QEMU, no Homebrew, no Docker, no kernel extension.

The Apple-silicon requirement is not a packaging choice. Both engines run guest code natively on the CPU, so a guest must be ARM64. Nothing here emulates a foreign instruction set, which is why there is no x86 guest support on any Mac.

Install

Drag 1VM.app to /Applications and open it. On first launch macOS verifies the signature and notarization; after that it opens straight away, including with no network.

The command line

1vm ships inside the app bundle so the two front ends cannot drift apart. Link it onto your PATH:

ln -sf /Applications/1VM.app/Contents/MacOS/1vm /usr/local/bin/1vm
1vm --version

Everything the app can do, 1vm can do — see The 1vm command line.

Why signing matters

The app must carry the com.apple.security.virtualization entitlement or every machine fails to start. This is an Apple requirement for any process that uses Virtualization.framework, and the first-party engine additionally needs the hypervisor entitlement.

The practical consequence for you: do not move the binary out of the app bundle, and do not strip the signature. If you build from source, the packaging script signs as part of building rather than as a release step, precisely so a local build is never mysteriously broken.

Where machines are stored

By default machines live in your home directory as a library of folders. Set ONEVM_HOME to keep them somewhere else — an external SSD, for example:

export ONEVM_HOME=/Volumes/Fast/vms

Each machine is a self-contained folder. See The VM bundle.

Check the host

1vm doctor reports the host, entitlements, library and both engines, and 1vm capabilities prints what this specific Mac can and cannot do — nested virtualization, for instance, is feature-detected rather than assumed.

1vm doctor
1vm capabilities