vladh / virtualserial

Create virtual serial ports on macOS.

virtualserial

This package allows you to create virtual serial ports on macOS. It uses socat, and is a successor of sorts to MacOSXVirtualSerialPort.

Installation

Until it makes sense to put virtualserial on Homebrew, I've included a precompiled binary. You just need to install socat.

brew install socat

Then clone this repo and:

make install

Usage

See virtualserial help. Here are some basics.

Create a new pair as follows:

$ virtualserial create master slave 9600

You can then see the two serial ports using ls:

$ ls -la
lrwxr-xr-x   1 vladh  staff    12B Sep 18 16:38 master -> /dev/ttys002
lrwxr-xr-x   1 vladh  staff    12B Sep 18 16:38 slave -> /dev/ttys003

You can create multiple pairs and keep track of them.

$ virtualserial show
Current instances:
[15817], master -> slave at baud 9600

Kill that pair:

$ virtualserial kill <pid>
Instance killed: 15817

Note: It looks like you can't create things in /dev/ on the latest version of macOS, so it's recommended that you create the serial ports anywhere else.