Lima VM — Life Changing? Or a Passing Fad?

Photo by Daniil Komov on Unsplash I accidentally built a self-hosted iOS CI pipeline A few days ago, I discovered Lima VM . At first, it was just curiosity. I wanted a cleaner way to isolate my development environments without constantly fighting my local machine. I didn’t expect it to turn into this: I now have a self-hosted CI pipeline that builds iOS apps using macOS VMs running inside my Mac . It Started With a Simple Problem Like most developers, I was juggling environments: development vs staging different .env setups Docker containers stepping on each other Everything worked … but it never felt clean. So I tried something different. One Project, Two Machines Instead of one machine handling everything, I split a single project into two Lima VMs : Dev VM → hot reload, fast iteration Staging VM → pull changes, build production images, test Each VM had its own hostname: lima-project-dev.local lima-project.local No conflicts. No weird container overlaps. No “wait, which environment a