manzanas

A Mac daemon for multi-agent iOS simulator fleet orchestration: leases, actions, streaming, deterministic state, and an exportable run journal for AI agents (and humans) sharing simulators.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/deb577d0-1123-4a89-90d8-8d9c7684a3cf

The launch film — leases, actions, live streaming, warm pools, the broker, and the run journal in 52 seconds. Sound on.

manzanasd runs on each Mac host and owns everything stateful — the simulator registry, the lease table, the warm pool, action backends, streamers, golden images, and the run journal. Clients (manzanas CLI, MCP facade, SDKs) are thin and cross-platform, speaking a versioned JSON protocol over HTTP + WebSocket. manzanas-broker federates N daemons behind one endpoint — start with one Mac, and when you outgrow it the same clients lease across the whole fleet without changing a line.

Two agents lease pre-warmed simulators — parked sims thaw on grant instead of paying a 5 s+ boot — then drive one (warm taps land in ~50 ms end-to-end) and export the run journal as PR-ready evidence.

Website: manzanasd.vercel.app (source in site/).

Install

brew tap baribarigood/tap https://github.com/BariBariGood/homebrew-tap
brew trust baribarigood/tap      # Homebrew >= 6 requires trusting third-party taps
brew install manzanasd            # daemon (+ pulls in the manzanas CLI)
brew services start manzanasd     # launchd service on port 7433

See docs/install.md for launchd tarball installs and alternatives, and docs/quickstart.md for a single-Mac walkthrough from install to first screenshot.

Why

Agents driving simulators over raw SSH + CLI tools trip over each other and pay huge fixed costs. manzanasd removes both, with measured numbers (M3 Pro, macOS 26.5, Xcode 26.5; reproduce with make bench):

• Leases, not locks: TTL-bounded exclusive claims with FIFO queues — no two agents ever drive the same sim.
• Park/thaw warm pool: idle sims are SIGSTOPped (a parked tree is unschedulable — ~0 idle host CPU no matter what the sim's daemons are doing) and thawed on lease grant: ~0.28 s lease-to-live vs ~7 s for a cold boot (~29 s first boot). The thaw itself is a cached-PID SIGCONT and takes under a millisecond.
• Warm actions: a resident per-sim helper makes an end-to-end tap ~36 ms vs ~950 ms cold (per-action AXe spawn) — ~3 s cold on Intel.
• Deterministic state: snapshots, fixtures, per-lease auto-reset, and golden images that stamp out slimmed sims in seconds (~0.75 GB vs ~5 GB stock, via simslim) — how one Mac runs a dozen sims.
• Evidence: every mutating op under a lease is journaled, with content-addressed artifacts and a PR-ready markdown export.

the browser /view MJPEG live page	the built-in /dash fleet dashboard

Quickstart

New here? docs/quickstart.md walks through a full single-Mac session (install → lease → tap → screenshot). The short version:

make build            # builds bin/manzanasd, bin/manzanas, bin/manzanas-broker

# on a Mac with Xcode:
./bin/manzanasd --addr :7433

# anywhere (Linux/dev/CI), with a mock fleet:
./bin/manzanasd --addr :7433 --mock

# list simulators
curl -s localhost:7433/v0/targets | jq

# lease one by label, boot it, release it
curl -s -X POST localhost:7433/v0/leases \
  -d '{"labels":["ios26"],"agent_id":"me","ttl_seconds":300}' | jq
curl -s -X POST localhost:7433/v0/targets/<udid>/boot -d '{"lease_id":"<id>"}' | jq
curl -s -X DELETE localhost:7433/v0/leases/<id> | jq

Or the thin client (--json for machine output; see clients/):

manzanas targets
manzanas lease acquire --labels ios26 --agent me --wait
manzanas tap 200 400 --lease lse_...
manzanas mcp        # lease-scoped MCP tools over stdio for agents

Production installs (launchd, releases): docs/install.md.

MCP (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex)

manzanas mcp serves the whole toolset over the Model Context Protocol (stdio), so any MCP-capable agent can lease and drive simulators — with per-session auto-release of leases and self-describing tool errors. Ready-to-paste client configs and troubleshooting: docs/mcp.md.

claude mcp add manzanas -e MANZANASD_ADDR=mac-host:7433 -- /path/to/manzanas mcp

Architecture

┌ Linux / CI / anywhere ────────────┐        ┌ each Mac host ─────────────────────────────┐
│ manzanas (thin client, Go)         │   WS   │ manzanasd (Go daemon)  :7433                │
│  - CLI: lease/tap/observe/...     │◄──────►│  registry ── warm pool (park/thaw, gates)  │
│  - MCP facade (stdio)             │  HTTP  │  leases (TTL, labels, FIFO, auto-reset)    │
│  - eval harness (manzanas-eval)    │        │  actions ── cold AXe / warm simbridge      │
├───────────────────────────────────┤        │  streams (MJPEG fan-out, browser view)     │
│ manzanas-broker  :7440             │        │  state (snapshots, fixtures, golden images)│
│  fleet-wide placement: leases are │───────►│  journal (evidence, artifacts, export.md)  │
│  scheduled across N daemons, then │ probe/ └────────────────────────────────────────────┘
│  clients talk to the owning       │ lease         × one daemon per Mac in the fleet
│  daemon directly (host_addr)      │
└───────────────────────────────────┘

Documentation

Protocol:

• proto/PROTOCOL.md — the v0 wire protocol: targets, leases, actions (incl. composite tap_element/type_into_element and actions:batch), streams, state, images, journal, WS surface.

Subsystems:

• docs/architecture.md — components and the interface contracts between slices.
• docs/agent-qa.md — a worked end-to-end agent QA session, plus driving animated (React Native) apps: screenshot/type races, waiting strategy, batch entry shape.
• docs/devices.md — physical iPhones as leasable targets (devicectl + WebDriverAgent).
• docs/recording.md — per-lease video capture into the journal.
• docs/warm-pool.md — park/thaw warm pool, footprint watchdog, host safety gates (503 overloaded).
• docs/actions-warm.md — warm vs cold action paths; the resident simbridge helper.
• docs/streaming.md — MJPEG streaming and the browser view page.
• docs/dashboard.md — the built-in read-only web dashboard at /dash (fleet, leases, pool, journal browser).
• docs/state.md — snapshots, fixtures, per-lease auto-reset, quarantine.
• docs/images.md — golden images: slim once, stamp N sims in seconds.
• docs/journal.md — run journal format, artifacts, GC.
• docs/broker.md — multi-Mac federation.
• docs/eval.md — the scenario-driven determinism benchmark harness.
• docs/mcp.md — the MCP server: setup, Claude Code/Cursor/Codex configuration, troubleshooting.
• clients/README.md — manzanas CLI + MCP quickstarts; clients/npm/; GitHub Action in action/.

Operations:

• docs/install.md — launchd install, releases, Homebrew formula.
• docs/fleet.md — running a multi-Mac fleet (topology, Tailscale, day-2 ops).
• docs/troubleshooting.md — 503 overloaded, boot failures, parked-sim semantics, quarantine, and friends.

The physical fleet this runs on (machines, locks, build caching) is site-specific; docs/fleet.md covers the daemon's part.

Status

Everything above is implemented and running on the fleet — leases + queues, warm pool with safety gates, cold (AXe) + warm (simbridge) action backends, composite/batch actions, MJPEG streaming, video capture, snapshots/fixtures/auto-reset, golden images, journal, dashboard, physical-device support, broker, eval harness, CLI + MCP. Verify with go build ./... && go vet ./... && go test ./... (Linux-safe; simctl paths are mocked).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.