Shared Folders and Clipboard

Shared folders#

A shared folder is a folder of your Mac that the guest can open.

Add one under Shared Folders in the machine's toolbar, in its settings, or with:

swiftvm share web-server ~/Projects
swiftvm share web-server ~/Reference --read-only
swiftvm unshare web-server ~/Projects

Folders can be added and removed while the machine runs.

Linux guests you installed yourself#

Guests that SwiftVM didn't set up don't mount shared folders by themselves. Install the guest tools and they are mounted whenever the machine runs.

Without the guest tools, mount them in the guest:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/shared && sudo mount -t virtiofs swiftvm /mnt/shared

To mount them at every start, also run this once:

echo 'swiftvm /mnt/shared virtiofs rw,nofail 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Clipboard#

Text you copy on your Mac can be pasted in the guest, and the other way round.

• Only text is shared, up to about 250 kB. Pictures and files stay where they were copied.
• In a macOS guest, the clipboard follows whoever is logged in at its screen.
• Turn it off for a guest that shouldn't see what you copy: Share Clipboard in the machine's settings, or swiftvm share-clipboard <machine> off.