Finch

About

Finch is an open source client for container development. Its simple installer provides a minimal native client along with an opinionated distribution of other open source components. Rather than adding more options to choose from, Finch makes it easy to install and use existing projects, offering a simple native client to tie them together.

Finch's client integrates with nerdctl, which handles core build, run, push, and pull commands. Those commands work with containerd for container management and with BuildKit for Open Container Initiative (OCI) image builds. These components run inside a virtual machine managed by Lima. Finch is installable on macOS via a release package or Homebrew, on Windows via an MSI installer (requiring WSL 2 and a one-time `finch vm init`), and on Linux via packages or binaries.

Finch is intended as a developer tool and is not meant for production environments or multi-tenant workloads, since the virtual machine on macOS and Windows does not create a security boundary.