What it does

Kinhin turns an Apple Silicon Mac into an autoscaling fleet of ephemeral self-hosted CI runners. It runs macOS jobs in Tart virtual machines. Linux jobs are optional. Setup starts with a configuration file that holds an accounts entry and the labels jobs will request. The user stores a forge access token with kinhin auth set. The token is kept in the Keychain rather than in a file. Running kinhin doctor checks prerequisites and shows how many virtual machines the Mac can host. Running kinhin image prepare prepares the runner base image once. Running kinhin start launches the fleet in the foreground. Running kinhin daemon install sets it up as a headless LaunchAgent that survives reboots. GitLab jobs select runners by runner tags. GitHub, Gitea and Forgejo jobs select runners by runs-on labels.

Capabilities

One fleet can serve several forges at once, including GitHub Actions, Gitea, Forgejo and GitLab CE.
Optional Linux jobs run on apple/container microVMs (recommended), Docker containers or Tart Linux VMs.
A menu bar app shows the number of live runner VMs, and kinhin watch and kinhin status show fleet state in the terminal.
Seven agent skills cover install, configure, adding a forge account, routing a workflow, operating, images and toolchains, and troubleshooting.
kinhin mcp gives an AI agent read access to status, doctor, logs and the live pipeline, plus pause and resume.

When to use it

You want your own Apple Silicon Mac to act as self-hosted CI runners for GitHub Actions, Gitea, Forgejo or GitLab CE.
You want an AI agent such as Claude Code to set up the fleet while you only store the access token yourself.
You need to install on an air-gapped machine from a local DMG.