HelixML

Mac App — operator settings

VM management, disk expansion, LAN sharing, licensing, and updates for the Mac App.

This page covers settings for people managing the Mac App for a team. If you're setting up the Mac App for the first time, see Mac App (Get Started).

Licensing

The Mac App requires a license activated against your Helix account.

  • Individual: Included with a personal Helix Cloud subscription
  • Team: Up to 15 seats under one Mac App license. Each Mac is a separate deployment.
  • Enterprise: Unlimited seats, SSO, RBAC — contact sales →

Licenses are managed at app.helix.ml/account/licenses.

Local VM management

The Mac App runs a local UTM virtual machine to host the sandbox containers. This VM is created on first launch and runs in the background.

Disk expansion: Agent sessions clone repositories and may cache Docker images. If the VM runs low on disk, expand it from the Mac App menu → Virtual Machine → Expand disk. Add at least 50 GB at a time; the VM cannot shrink.

VM restart: If agent sessions hang or the video stream stops, restart the VM from the Mac App menu → Virtual Machine → Restart. Active sessions will be lost; in-progress commits are preserved on the working branch.

VM reset: Recreates the VM from scratch. Use this if the VM is badly corrupted. All uncommitted agent work and cached Docker images will be lost. Do this during off-hours.

LAN sharing

LAN sharing lets your team access your Mac's Helix instance from other machines on the same network without exposing anything to the internet.

Enable it in the Mac App settings. Once enabled, the app displays a LAN URL like http://192.168.1.42:8080 that teammates can open in their browsers.

LAN sharing is read/write — teammates can create projects, run spec tasks, and watch agent desktops. There is no per-user authentication on the LAN URL by default; configure network-level access controls if needed.

Updates

The Mac App updates automatically. Check the current version and update status from the Mac App menu → Check for Updates.

Major version updates may require VM recreation — the app will prompt you before proceeding. Minor updates apply without restarting active sessions.

Running fully local (no internet)

The Mac App can run entirely without an internet connection if you:

  1. Use a local LLM provider via Ollama (requires 64 GB+ unified memory for useful models)
  2. Connect only to local or self-hosted git servers

Toggle wifi off — the app continues to work. Sandboxes may fail to install packages if they require internet access; pre-warm the Docker image cache for the packages your agents use.

Connecting to Helix Cloud

If your team uses both the Mac App and Helix Cloud, you can connect the Mac App to Helix Cloud for shared projects, team members, and billing:

Go to the Mac App settings → Cloud Account and sign in with your Helix Cloud credentials.

When connected, Helix Cloud projects appear in the Mac App. Spec tasks you run locally use the Mac's sandbox (data stays local); spec tasks run from a teammate's browser use Cloud sandboxes.