vms

Run your daily computing as a fleet of small Arch Linux VMs — one for work, one for banking, one for hobby projects, one for whatever you want to throw away tomorrow.

A small wrapper around libvirt/QEMU/KVM that makes both ends of the spectrum easy: long-lived VMs you keep around for years, and quick disposable ones you fork, poke at, and destroy. Inspired by Qubes, but simpler, hackable, and made of plain bash.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/dem/vms.git && cd vms
./vms bootstrap                  # one-time host setup
./vms create work dev            # fresh Arch VM with the dev profile
./vms viewer work                # SPICE window, ready to use

That's it. No YAML, no Ansible, no daemons of your own.

What it gives you

• Fast creation — full Arch install from ISO, automated via the serial console.
• Instant clones — vms fork src new makes a copy-on-write VM in under a second.
• Profiles — gui, browser, telegram, dev. Stack them on top of any VM, any time.
• Shared folders — vms mount myvm ~/projects /home/user/projects exposes a host dir over virtiofs, with --readonly and --temp modes.
• Shared package cache — pacman downloads happen once on the host, every guest reads from it.
• SPICE & serial — graphical viewer for daily use, serial console for headless poking.
• One bash script per command — readable, debuggable, no framework to learn.

A typical day

vms list                         # see what's running
vms fork dev scratch             # quick disposable copy of your dev VM
vms apply scratch --memory 8G    # bump RAM on the fly
vms viewer scratch               # poke at it
vms destroy scratch              # done

Disposable VMs

Anything you don't want to keep, you fork from a trusted base, use, and destroy:

vms fork dev scratch             # copy-on-write, no real disk used yet
vms viewer scratch               # do the sketchy thing
vms destroy scratch              # gone, host untouched

Forks share their parent's disk via qcow2 backing files, so they're nearly free to create and only consume space for what you actually change. Pair this with a clean gui or browser template and you have a per-task throwaway environment in one second.

Profiles

Profiles add packages and config on top of the base system. They're hierarchical, idempotent, and can be applied at create time or after the fact:

vms create chat telegram         # gui + telegram, autostarts Telegram
vms apply chat dev               # add dev tools later

Profile	What's in it
gui	i3 + X11 + spice-vdagent — minimal desktop
browser	gui + chromium + firefox
telegram	gui + Telegram, set as the autostart app
dev	gui + git, neovim, tmux, docker, ripgrep, claude-code, …

Adding your own profile is dropping a script into guest/profiles/.

Requirements

• Arch Linux host (or an Arch derivative — Omarchy works)
• CPU with KVM, ~16 GB RAM if you want to run several VMs at once
• That's all the host needs — vms bootstrap installs the rest

Guests are Arch too, by design. One distro, one set of scripts, no abstractions.

Status

Built for daily personal use. The CLI is stable, the internals are plain bash you can read in an afternoon. See docs/goals.md for the philosophy and docs/cli-design.md for the full command reference.