If you leave out --ram-size and --cpu-count, Anka will choose for you based on your total CPU and RAM. It will try to halve the total CPU and RAM values, but has a min of 2CPU/4GB and a max of 8CPU/8GB

We recommend naming your initial VM after the version of macOS

Be aware of the user you’re executing Anka CLI commands as. If you create VMs as root, they won’t be available (when running anka list) to other users on the system and vice versa

By default anka create creates a VM Template with the username anka and password admin. Environment variable are available to change these: ANKA_DEFAULT_USER and ANKA_DEFAULT_PASSWD (be sure to use sudo -E when issuing the create command)

The VM creation should take around 30 minutes

Anka Develop licenses default your VM in a stopped state (the only available state)

Anka Build licenses default your VM in a suspended state. You can tell Anka to stop the VM instead of suspending with an ENV: ANKA_CREATE_SUSPEND=0

Catalina and lower VMs are created with SIP/Kext Consent disabled by default. It’s strongly advised to keep these settings for optimal Anka performance. If you need to re-enable SIP/Kext Consent, then use this command anka modify {vmNameOrUUID} set custom-variable sys.csr-active-config 0

If you’re using --postinstall and your script is failing, you can see STDOUT/ERR inside of /var/log/install.log. This log file is found inside of the VM.

On Catalina and higher, the --postinstall requires a package and will no longer accept scripts like Mojave did. We have a script that can convert your scripts to pkg files here.