Consai 🌳

A menu-bar-first macOS app for managing Apple container and container-compose stacks — glance, act, done.

Consai = container + bonsai — a small, contained tree.

Why Consai?

Stop alt-tabbing to a terminal or opening a full-window GUI just to check on a container. Consai lives in your menu bar: see every container — grouped into the compose stack it belongs to — with live CPU, memory, and IP. One click to start, stop, restart, delete, view logs, or open a shell. Open the pop-out panel for the full garden.

• Menu-bar native — LSUIElement SwiftUI app, no Dock icon, no windowing overhead
• Compose stacks — projects launched through Consai are tracked reliably; external containers can be grouped by name prefix (off by default)
• Live without polling hard — adaptive intervals (2s open, 15s closed) + immediate re-poll after every action
• Degrades gracefully — works without container-compose; surfaces a clear setup banner on a fresh machine
• No Docker, no Docker Desktop — talks directly to Apple's container daemon via the official Swift SDK

Lightweight companion to full GUI tools like Orchard.

Screenshots

Requirements

• macOS 26 (Tahoe) — container only ships here
• Xcode 26 / Swift 6.2 — required to build (uses the apple/container Swift 6.2 package)
• container installed and its system service running
• container-compose — optional, for stack features (brew install container-compose). Consai degrades gracefully without it.

Install

# Once packaged (release artifact pending): Homebrew cask — see packaging/consai.rb
brew install --cask DonsWayo/consai/consai

Build from source

Consai builds with SwiftPM (not an .xcodeproj — see CLAUDE.md R11):

swift build                  # build the app
swift run bundle             # build + assemble a runnable Consai.app, then: open Consai.app
swift test                   # unit tests (no container daemon needed)
swift run coverage           # after `swift test --enable-code-coverage`: print coverage report
open Package.swift           # Xcode GUI development (uses SwiftPM's build)

Build tooling (bundle, icon, hero, coverage) is native Swift — executable targets under Tools/, run with swift run <name>. No shell scripts.

Testing

swift test                       # unit tests (pure logic, no daemon)

# End-to-end against a LIVE daemon (creates + deletes throwaway consai-e2e-* containers,
# pulls alpine, runs a real compose up/down). Requires `container` running + container-compose.
CONSAI_E2E=1 swift test

E2E is gated behind CONSAI_E2E=1 and is destructive (throwaway resources only — never touches containers it didn't create). It verifies the real SDK lifecycle (create/start/ stop/delete), service status, and compose grouping. Note: the SDK library version must match your installed daemon (see CLAUDE.md R1) — a skew surfaces as XPC decode errors.

Architecture

• ConsaiCore — UI-free Swift package: container/compose engines (behind protocols), stack-assembly, service health. Reusable by a future full app.
• ConsaiKit — orchestration layer (AppState, mock engines) for the menu-bar app; unit-testable with no daemon.
• Consai (App/) — thin SwiftUI MenuBarExtra layer.

See CLAUDE.md for the risk register and conventions, and specs/ for the design and implementation waves.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. Before opening one, read CLAUDE.md — particularly R1 (SDK pin matches your daemon) and R11 (SwiftPM, not .xcodeproj). The build is fast after the first run.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.