What's the reasoning behind preventing the use of UTMCTL over SSH?

[pkolyvas]

Use Case

I use UTM as direct replacement for Vagrant on my Apple Silicon macs.

I run headless arm64 builds of Linux servers which I can SSH into for local development/testing purposes.

Typically, I'll setup a default "base" image and then clone it—not unlike using templates/machine images in cloud platforms like AWS.

Recently I ran into an issue where a number of docker images for specific workflow weren't available for arm64 platforms. Instead of attempting to rebuild those images as multi-arch or specifically for arm64, I thought I'd log into my intel mac workstation via SSH and use utmctl in the same way there to expedite development.

Problem

When I tried to run utmctl over SSH I got the following message:

Error from event: The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -1743.)
NOTE: utmctl does not work from SSH sessions or before logging in.

I wanted to prompt a discussion on why this is the case? Particularly for headless VMs, it strikes me as an uncessaary limitation, but again, I'm asking from a place where I probably don't have the whole picture.

The strange thing is, there's an easy workaround: simply starting a "screen" session directly from the remote mac, and then accessing it remotely allows me to use utmctl over SSH just fine so the limitation seems moot? Or maybe my use case is limited and the workaround is fine.

[naveenrajm7]

Hello

Thanks for sharing the workaround, it's really helpful as I am trying to see if I can support vagrant share for the Vagrant UTM Plugin ( Check out the plugin if you want vagrant + UTM setup)

Also, I found the reason why utmctl doesn't work over ssh from #5377 (comment)

This is unfortunately a limitation of how apple scripting bridge works. You must have the GUI launched or launchable in an interactive instance. I don’t think it works with SSH.

[pkolyvas]

Will totally check out the Vagrant UTM plugin! Didn't know it exists. Thank you. :)