Apple container

Added in version 26.04

Apple container is a lightweight container runtime that uses the Virtualization framework to run each container inside its own virtual machine on macOS.

Prerequisites

Apple container requires Apple silicon (M1 or newer) and a recent macOS release.

Start the system service before running your pipeline:

container system start

How it works

Enable Apple container in the Nextflow configuration file:

appleContainer.enabled = true
process.container = 'nextflow/examples:latest'

Whenever your pipeline launches a task, Nextflow runs it inside a container created from the specified image using the container run command.

Each container runs in its own lightweight virtual machine. This isolates tasks without the overhead of running a full virtual machine for each one. Images are standard OCI images that you can pull from any registry.

note

Apple container only supports Linux images. To run an amd64 image on Apple silicon, pass --rosetta via appleContainer.runOptions and set the platform explicitly, for example, process.arch = 'linux/amd64'.

Advanced settings

See the appleContainer configuration scope for advanced Apple container settings.