A guide to Orka3, a command-line tool for running macOS virtual machines on Mac hardware. It covers virtual machines, reusable system images, hardware nodes, namespaces, CI/CD pipelines, and early-access Android emulators.

Use it to manage macOS virtual machines and images, configure namespaces, run CI/CD jobs, use service accounts, and check asynchronous operation status.

It explains which commands and authentication methods apply to Intel or Apple Silicon Macs and to local or automated environments.

orka3-cli — Skill by macstadium

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/macstadium/orka3-cli-agent-skill/orka3-cli

Any agent

npx skills add macstadium/orka3-cli-agent-skill --skill orka3-cli

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/macstadium/orka3-cli-agent-skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,411 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00049	$0.02411
Opus 5	$0.00024	$0.01205
Sonnet 5	$0.00010	$0.00482
Haiku 4.5	$0.00005	$0.00241

Measured 3d ago against content hash 4dc63c605d56, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

orka3-cli scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

orka3-cli/SKILL.md · 196 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 196 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Orka3 CLI Skill

Essential Context

Orka runs macOS VMs on physical Mac hardware in two architectures: Intel (amd64) — Mac Pro, Intel Mac mini, iMac Pro — and Apple Silicon (arm64) — M1/M2/M3/M4 Mac mini, Mac Studio. They have different command sets: ARM gets vm push and imagecache; Intel gets power operations (start/stop/suspend/resume/revert), ISO management, and GPU passthrough.

User tokens expire in 1 hour. All automation and CI/CD must use service accounts (orka3 sa create, orka3 sa token), which support long-lived or non-expiring tokens.

Four execution contexts: local machine (full CLI), CI/CD (ephemeral containers — env vars injected at runtime, failed VMs often auto-deleted), Claude Code (has CLI access — probe with orka3 node list), and chat (no CLI access — answer from documentation only).

Image save, commit, push, and caching are async. Always pair with the status-check command: orka3 image list <IMAGE>, orka3 imagecache info <IMAGE>, or orka3 vm get-push-status <JOB>.

Namespace resolution (v3.5.2+): --namespace flag > ORKA_DEFAULT_NAMESPACE env var > kubeconfig context > orka-default. Some features (shared disk, namespace auto-detection, macOS Tahoe) require v3.5.2+.

Kubernetes upgrade resilience (v3.6+): Most orka3 commands continue working during k8s control-plane upgrades. Only login and vm push require the API server; expect failures for those two until the upgrade completes.

VM network isolation (v3.6+, Apple Silicon only): MacStadium can configure per-cluster allow/deny rules by CIDR block to restrict VM network access. Configured by support, not via CLI. Contact [email protected] to set up.

Android Emulators (Apple Silicon, 3.7+ early access): orka3 emulator deploy|list|delete runs an Android emulator on the same host node as a running macOS VM, connected over an ADB relay. Not GA, not for production. Network isolation is node-level (any VM on the node can reach any emulator on it), NAT only, and ephemeral (no persistent AVD state). See references/commands/emulator-commands.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 196 lines

Files

What ships with it

25 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

3d ago First seen · 196 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 4dc63c605d56

Subscribe to this mod's changes

orka3-cli is a skill published in the GitHub repository macstadium/orka3-cli-agent-skill (3 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 2,411 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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orka3-cli

Getting it into your agent

What it costs to keep this loaded

Grade A, and why

Nothing flagged

How it starts

Orka3 CLI Skill

Essential Context

What ships with it

What this file has done since we first saw it

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