Run persisted Kali seamlessly on Apple's MacOS's lightweight Container service (https://github.com/apple/container).

NOTE: By persistence, it means that the container can be stopped, started and reused, mimicking a VM-like experience but with containers.

I love using containers to run Kali due to its lightweightness and speed when starting a session. Apple's Container service ensures fast and lightweight runtime of containers on MacOS.

Its simple! Just run ./setup.sh.

By default, a container kali-container is created before mounting the directory kali-share from ~/Desktop to the container allowing cross file sharing between MacOS.

After using the container, enter exit to close the session and the container stops automatically. Use the command kali-start to start and get back to the container. If you want to open multiple shells, run kali-shell when the container is running. Check container status with container list -a.

Kali images does not come with any packages installed. After setup, run the below two commands in a kali-container session to install packages and tools such as nmap and msfconsole.

apt-get update
apt install -y kali-linux-headless

Need to rebuild or create a new container? Just re-run the script! You may delete old containers with container rm <container-name>.

To allocate more resources, such as using 4 CPUs and 8GB of memory, modify below variables in setup.sh:

CONTAINER_CPUS="4"
CONTAINER_MEMORY="8GB"

Otherwise, leave empty as "" to use default system values. If you wish to configure CPU and Memory resources, set the above in setup.sh before running.

The following commands will be available after setup. They are meant for making it easy to start your kali session. Make sure to run source ~/.zshrc or start a new shell after setup to enable the aliases.

• kali-start: This starts the container again after it was exited
• kali-shell: This spawns additional shell sessions on a running container