Recovery Mode Boot & SSH Access Issue During Automated Disk Resize

[DominikWunderlich]

Hi everyone!

I have a question regarding the use of the --recovery option.

In my current setup, I clone VM images from Artifactory. To keep storage efficient, these images are initially ~60GB. After Jenkins pulls the image, it resizes the VM partition via SSH using diskutil commands.

However, when I boot the VM using tart run --recovery, the VM pauses at the recovery screen where I would need to manually select “Options” before macOS continues booting. At this point, SSH is not yet available and the connection is refused.

Is there a known workaround to automate this step or to enable SSH access during recovery mode?

Referencing #1042 with this message.

Thanks in advance!

[fkorotkov]

@DominikWunderlich why do you run the VM in recovery to only continue booting into macOS?

If you'd like to dynamically change disk size, please take a look at Tart Guest Agent and how to launch it. This way when you do tart set --disk-size then on boot the agent will make sure macOS is aware of the new space.

[DominikWunderlich]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I initially came across the recovery mode approach from the Tart FAQ section on manual disk resizing, which is why I was trying to use --recovery.

However, I’ve since updated my setup: I now remove the recovery partition during image creation via Packer and perform the resizing using a regular tart run, passing the necessary diskutil commands over SSH — this works well in my case.

I wasn't aware of the Tart Guest Agent — thanks for pointing that out! I’ll definitely look into integrating it to streamline the resizing process even further.

Appreciate the support!