Installation

Prerequisites

sand itself runs on macOS or Linux. What else you need depends on where you want the VMs to run.

To run VMs on this machine (the default), you need Lima and a working hypervisor. macOS has a hypervisor built in; on Linux, Lima needs QEMU/KVM — see the Lima installation docs if limactl doesn't already work on your machine. You don't need to install Lima separately: Homebrew pulls it in as a dependency of the sand formula below.

To run VMs somewhere else, this machine needs nothing but sand:

• On another machine over SSH, Lima and the hypervisor live on that machine instead, and you need passwordless SSH to it.
• On a Proxmox VE host, no Lima is involved at all — sand talks to the Proxmox API over HTTPS. The host needs a one-time token and pool setup.

Either way, add the machine as a Connection Profile once and sand uses it from then on.

Install sand

sand ships as a prebuilt Homebrew formula (not a cask — deliberately, so the same install works on both macOS and Linux) from the lullabot/homebrew-sandbar tap:

brew install lullabot/sandbar/sand

That taps the repository and installs the formula in one step.

Verify it worked

sand version

Upgrading and removing

brew upgrade sand
brew uninstall sand   # does not delete your VMs

Uninstalling leaves every VM where it is. Delete the ones you don't want first — press d on a tile in the board, or, for a local VM, run limactl delete <name>.