CLI Reference

Minimal ships as a small set of binaries split across two planes:

• The session plane manages sandboxed development sessions. The min CLI talks to the minimald host daemon, which creates and supervises sessions. On macOS (and optionally on Linux), minimald runs inside a Linux microVM managed by the minvmd daemon.
• The package/build plane evaluates declarative package configuration (minimal.toml plus Nickel files), builds packages in clean rooms, runs tasks in sandboxes, and manages the content-addressed artifact cache. This is the mip CLI.

Binaries

Binary	Role	Reference
min	Session CLI — create, attach to, and manage sandboxed dev sessions	min
mip	Package/build CLI — build packages, run tasks, manage the cache	mip
minimald	Host daemon — serves sessions to min over SSH-on-UDS	minimald
minvmd	VM daemon — boots the Linux microVM that hosts minimald	minvmd

Platform availability

• Linux: installs ship min, mip, and minimald. minimald runs natively by default; min --minvmd routes sessions through the minvmd microVM instead, which needs a separately obtained minvmd binary (a prebuilt Linux amd64 minvmd is attached to each GitHub Release; arm64 must build from source).
• macOS: installs ship min and minvmd only. minimald always runs inside the microVM, and the package/build plane runs there with it — there is no native macOS mip.
• mip run (and its shell/build/test shorthands) executes tasks in Linux sandboxes and is available on Linux only.

In-sandbox helper commands

Task sandboxes expose a small set of helper commands (add, search, check, run) for use from inside a running sandbox. Those are documented separately in sandbox operations.