Getting started
Introduction
Herds turns any Mac you own into a programmable cloud runtime — a real machine your code, agents, SDKs, and CLIs can drive from anywhere. Think Modal, but the sandbox is macOS: Xcode builds, iOS simulators, codesigning, AppleScript, and native app testing, exposed as an API.
The idea#
Linux sandboxes can’t build an iOS app, open a simulator, or codesign a binary. Real Apple work needs a real Mac. Herds takes the Mac on your desk and makes it callable: it dials home over a single outbound WebSocket (no inbound ports, no port forwarding), connects to a tiny control plane, and from then on you run commands on it from a Python SDK or the CLI.
The mental model
A
Mac is a machine you control. A Sandbox is an isolated, persistent workspace on it. A Volume is a named directory that survives across runs. You run commands, expose ports as public URLs, and ship code with put. If you’ve used Modal, this will feel familiar.What you can do#
- Run shell commands, Xcode/Swift builds, and test suites on a real Mac — synchronously, streamed, or fanned out in parallel.
- Spin up persistent sandboxes, ship a codebase into them, and run long-lived servers.
- Expose a port running in a sandbox as a public URL — share a preview or hit an endpoint.
- Mount durable volumes so caches, builds, and state survive across runs.
- Run a Python function remotely on the Mac with a decorator.
- Join several Macs into one fleet and address them by name.