Plain mode

Plain mode makes the VM instance as close as possible to a physical host by disabling Lima's convenience features such as filesystem mounts, dynamic port forwarding, and the built-in containerd.

It is useful when you want to provision the guest with plain old ssh and rsync, without relying on Lima-specific integrations. See the GitHub Actions example for a typical use case.

Enabling plain mode

{{< tabpane text=true >}} {{% tab header="YAML" %}}

plain: true

{{% /tab %}} {{% tab header="CLI (start)" %}}

limactl start --plain

{{% /tab %}} {{% tab header="CLI (edit)" %}}

limactl edit <instance> --plain

{{% /tab %}} {{< /tabpane >}}

Plain mode is disabled (false) by default.

What is disabled

When plain mode is enabled, the following features are turned off, and the corresponding YAML properties are ignored:

• Filesystem mounts (mounts)
• Dynamic port forwarding (portForwards rules that are not static: true)
• Built-in containerd (containerd.system and containerd.user)
• The guest agent daemon
• Rosetta (rosetta)
• SSH agent forwarding (ssh.forwardAgent)
• Host clock synchronization

Dependency packages such as sshfs are not installed into the VM either.

What still works

• Static port forwarding: portForwards rules with static: true are still established.
• Provisioning scripts: user, system, and data provisioning scripts are still executed.
• Base guest setup: the base user and SSH keys are still configured.

Accessing the instance

limactl shell <instance> and ssh both work, as in a non-plain instance. In plain mode, plain ssh is often preferred to keep the guest free of Lima-specific conventions. See SSH for details.

See also

Plain mode applies to all guest operating systems. For OS-specific differences, see the Guest OS pages:

• Linux
• FreeBSD
• macOS

For the underlying mechanics (boot scripts, LIMA_CIDATA_PLAIN, guest agent injection), see the internals reference.