Examples on Lima

AI agents

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Lima is useful for running AI agents inside a VM, so as to prevent agents from directly reading, writing, or executing the host files.

For running AI agents, it is highly recommended to only mount your project directory (current directory) into the VM:

limactl start --mount-only .:w

Drop :w for read-only mode.

Visual Studio Code

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Securing Visual Studio Code with Lima

Lima helps securing the development environment by running it inside a VM. Notably, this prevents AI agents, such as GitHub Copilot in VS Code, from directly executing untrusted commands on the host.

Start a Lima instance. If you use GitHub Copilot, consider disabling mounts by passing the --mount-none flag to prevent Copilot from accessing host files:

limactl start --mount-none

Add the following line to ~/.ssh/config:

Include ~/.lima/*/ssh.config

Open the Remote Explorer in the Visual Studio Code sidebar and select lima-<INSTANCE> from the SSH remote list.

GitHub Actions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Running Lima on GitHub Actions

On GitHub Actions, Lima is useful for:

Running commands on non-Ubuntu operating systems (e.g., Fedora for testing SELinux)
Emulating multiple hosts

While these tasks can be partially accomplished with containers like Docker, those containers still rely on the Ubuntu host’s kernel and cannot utilize features missing in Ubuntu, such as SELinux.

In contrast, Lima runs virtual machines that do not depend on the Ubuntu host’s kernel.