Guides

These guides cover Barn 1.2.0. The Barn 1.2.0 release notes summarize its changes and the upgrade from 1.1.0. You can run both Linux labs and isolated macOS VMs on the same Apple Silicon Mac—each workflow manages its own VMs under ~/.barn.

Get started

• Install Barn — Install the stable CLI on macOS or Linux, check host requirements, and upgrade existing installations.
• Linux Quick Start — Bring up an Ubuntu 24.04 VM, connect over SSH, and scale to a multi-node fixed-IP lab from one barn.yml.
• macOS Virtual Machines — Create and manage macOS 27 guests on Apple Silicon with a native desktop, SSH, shared folders, and clipboard sync.

Day-to-day Linux operations

• Daily Operations — Inspect status, stop and start nodes, preview inventory changes with plan, and recreate or destroy machines.
• Storage and Access — Configure persistent test data disks, transfer files over SSH, forward ports, and mount Virtio-9p host shares.
• Image Repositories — Pick from 9 distribution families, switch to the China mirror, build a static image repository, or import a local qcow2.
• Automation — Run unattended host setup, validate --json output with jq, execute scripts via barn provision, and pair with Pigsty.

Diagnostics, source builds, and cleanup

• Troubleshooting — Runbooks for host readiness, network repairs, guest stage warnings, SSH keys, and interrupted commands.
• Build from Source — Compile the v1.2.0 CLI, barn-hosts-helper, and native Barn.app bundle, and run contributor test gates.
• Uninstall and Clean Up — Tear down Linux and macOS VMs cleanly, prune image caches, remove host networking, and uninstall Barn.