vLLM Metal Plugin

High-performance LLM inference on Apple Silicon using MLX and vLLM

vLLM Metal is a plugin that enables vLLM to run on Apple Silicon Macs using MLX as the primary compute backend. It unifies MLX and PyTorch under a single lowering path.

Documentation: https://docs.vllm.ai/projects/vllm-metal/en/latest/

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Latest News 🔥

• [2026/04] We released the new version v0.2.0! Unified paged varlen Metal kernel is now the default attention backend. 83x TTFT, 3.6x throughput compared to v0.1.0.

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Requirements

• macOS on Apple Silicon

Installation

Using the install script, the following will be installed under the ~/.venv-vllm-metal directory (the default).

• vllm-metal plugin
• vllm core
• Related libraries

If you run source ~/.venv-vllm-metal/bin/activate, the vllm CLI becomes available and you can access the vLLM right away.

For how to use the vllm CLI, please refer to the official vLLM guide. https://docs.vllm.ai/en/latest/cli/

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vllm-project/vllm-metal/main/install.sh | bash