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Usage

Table of contents

Working with sandboxes

The basic workflow is run to start, ls to check status, stop to pause, and rm to clean up:

$ sbx run claude                    # start an agent
$ sbx ls                            # see what's running
$ sbx stop my-sandbox               # pause it
$ sbx rm my-sandbox                 # delete it entirely

If the sandbox has an active session — an open attach, SSH connection, or in-flight SFTP transfer — sbx rm refuses unless you pass --force:

$ sbx rm --force my-sandbox

To get a shell inside a running sandbox — useful for inspecting the environment, checking Docker containers, or manually installing something:

$ sbx exec -it <sandbox-name> bash

If you need a clean slate, remove the sandbox and re-run:

$ sbx stop my-sandbox
$ sbx rm my-sandbox
$ sbx run claude

Non-interactive login

For CI environments and scripts where a browser is not available, use a Docker Personal Access Token (PAT) with --username and --password-stdin:

$ echo "$DOCKER_PAT" | sbx login --username <your-docker-id> --password-stdin

--password-stdin reads the token from standard input to keep it out of your shell history. Generate a PAT from your Docker account settings with at least Read scope.

Interactive mode

Running sbx with no subcommands opens an interactive terminal dashboard:

$ sbx

The dashboard shows all your sandboxes as cards with live status, CPU, and memory usage. From here you can:

  • Create a sandbox (c).
  • Start or stop a sandbox (s).
  • Attach to an agent session (Enter), same as sbx run.
  • Open a shell inside the sandbox (x), same as sbx exec.
  • Remove a sandbox (r).

The dashboard also includes a network governance panel where you can monitor outbound connections made by your sandboxes and manage network rules. Use tab to switch between the sandboxes panel and the network panel.

From the network panel you can browse connection logs, allow or block specific hosts, and add custom network rules. Press ? to see all keyboard shortcuts.

Git workflow

When your workspace is a Git repository, you can choose one of two ways to share it with a sandbox. You make the choice when you create the sandbox:

  • Direct mode (default) — the agent has read-write access to your working tree. Changes the agent makes appear on your host immediately.
  • Clone mode (--clone) — the agent works on a private Git clone inside the sandbox, with your host repository mounted read-only. The sandbox exposes its clone as a Git remote on your host, so you fetch the agent's commits the same way you'd fetch from any other remote.

For a comparison of approaches and step-by-step recipes, see Workflow patterns. For the security model behind each mode, see Workspace isolation.

Direct mode (default)

The agent edits your working tree directly. Stage, commit, and push as you normally would. If you run multiple agents on the same repository at the same time, they may step on each other's changes — use clone mode to give each agent its own isolated workspace.

Clone mode

In clone mode, the sandbox becomes a Git remote on your host. Your entire working directory, including untracked files and files excluded by .gitignore, is mounted read-only inside the sandbox. The agent commits inside the sandbox; you pull its work back out by fetching from that remote.

Note

Clone mode was introduced in sbx v0.31.0 and replaces the --branch flag used in earlier versions. If your CLI doesn't recognize --clone, update to the latest version.

$ sbx run --clone claude

You can also create the sandbox in the background and attach later:

$ sbx create --clone --name my-sandbox claude .
$ sbx run --name my-sandbox

The clone follows whichever ref your host repository has checked out at create time. No new branch is created automatically.

Note

Clone mode is fixed at create time. To switch an existing sandbox to clone mode, remove it and recreate it with sbx create --clone.

The CLI copies the Git remotes from your host repository (origin, upstream, and so on) into the in-sandbox clone. The agent can push to your fork directly using the same remote names. Local-path remotes (file:// URLs, filesystem paths) aren't copied, since they aren't reachable from inside the sandbox.

Sandbox lifecycle and the Git remote

The Git daemon that exposes the in-sandbox clone runs as part of the sandbox itself. It's only reachable while the sandbox is running:

  • sbx stop shuts down the daemon. git fetch sandbox-<name> fails until the sandbox starts again.
  • Restarting the sandbox assigns a new ephemeral port to the daemon. The CLI updates the sandbox-<name> remote URL in your host repository's Git config automatically, so fetching continues to work without manual reconfiguration.
  • sbx rm removes the sandbox, the daemon, the published port, and the sandbox-<name> remote entry from your host repository.
Warning

Removing a clone-mode sandbox drops the in-sandbox clone along with it. Any commits you haven't fetched (git fetch sandbox-<name>) or pushed to an upstream remote are lost. sbx rm prints a warning before deleting a clone-mode sandbox — review it before confirming.

Restrictions

Clone mode requires a Git repository as the primary workspace, and is rejected at create time in two cases:

  • --clone on a non-Git workspace. Omit --clone for non-Git workspaces.
  • --clone from inside a Git worktree (other than the main one). The read-only bind mount can't resolve the worktree's .git pointer file. Run sbx create --clone from the main repository checkout instead.

You can also create a Git worktree yourself and run an agent inside it without --clone, but the sandbox won't have access to the .git directory in the parent repository, so the agent can't use Git at all. See Host worktree in Workflow patterns.

Reconnecting and naming

Sandboxes persist after the agent exits. Running the same workspace path again reconnects to the existing sandbox rather than creating a new one:

$ sbx run claude ~/my-project  # creates sandbox
$ sbx run claude ~/my-project  # reconnects to same sandbox

Use --name to give a sandbox an explicit identity:

$ sbx run claude --name my-project

Once a named sandbox exists, --name is how you re-attach to it — from any working directory, with or without the agent positional:

$ sbx run --name my-project        # re-attaches from anywhere
$ sbx run claude --name my-project # same, with agent confirmed

Re-running a command that previously created a sandbox reconnects to it rather than returning an error, so you can up-arrow and re-enter a session without first looking up the sandbox name.

To run multiple sandboxes against the same workspace — for example, one for a feature branch and one for exploratory changes — give each a distinct name:

$ sbx run claude --name feature ~/my-project
$ sbx run claude --name spike ~/my-project

Both sandboxes share the same workspace but are otherwise independent.

Creating without attaching

sbx run creates the sandbox and attaches you to the agent. To create a sandbox in the background without attaching:

$ sbx create --name my-project claude .

Unlike run, create requires an explicit workspace path. It uses direct mode by default, or pass --clone for clone mode. Attach later with sbx run --name:

$ sbx run --name my-project

Multiple workspaces

You can mount extra directories into a sandbox alongside the main workspace. The first path is the primary workspace — the agent starts here, and the sandbox's in-container Git clone is populated from this directory if you use --clone. Extra workspaces are always mounted directly.

All workspaces appear inside the sandbox at their absolute host paths. Append :ro to mount an extra workspace read-only — useful for reference material or shared libraries the agent shouldn't modify:

$ sbx run claude ~/project-a ~/shared-libs:ro ~/docs:ro

Each sandbox is completely isolated, so you can also run separate projects side-by-side. Remove unused sandboxes when you're done to reclaim disk space:

$ sbx run claude ~/project-a
$ sbx run claude ~/project-b
$ sbx rm <sandbox-name>       # when finished

Copying files between host and sandbox

Use sbx cp to copy files or directories between your host and a sandbox. This is useful for one-off files that aren't part of a mounted workspace, such as generated output, logs, or setup files.

$ sbx cp ./config.json my-sandbox:/home/user/
$ sbx cp my-sandbox:/home/user/output.log ./
$ sbx cp ./src/ my-sandbox:/home/user/src

One side of the copy must use SANDBOX:PATH. Copying directly between two sandboxes isn't supported.

Installing dependencies and using Docker

Ask the agent to install what's needed — it has sudo access, and installed packages persist for the sandbox's lifetime. For teams or repeated setups, see Customize for reusable templates and declarative kits.

Agents can also build Docker images, run containers, and use Compose. Everything runs inside the sandbox's private Docker daemon, so containers started by the agent never appear in your host's docker ps. When you remove the sandbox, all images, containers, and volumes inside it are deleted with it.

Accessing services in the sandbox

Sandboxes are network-isolated — your browser or local tools can't reach a server running inside one by default. Use sbx ports to forward traffic from your host into a running sandbox.

The common case: an agent has started a dev server or API, and you want to open it in your browser or run tests against it.

$ sbx ports my-sandbox --publish 8080:3000   # host 8080 → sandbox port 3000
$ open http://localhost:8080

To let the OS pick a free host port instead of choosing one yourself:

$ sbx ports my-sandbox --publish 3000        # ephemeral host port
$ sbx ports my-sandbox                       # check which port was assigned

sbx ls shows active port mappings alongside each sandbox, and sbx ports lists them in detail:

$ sbx ls
SANDBOX         AGENT   STATUS   PORTS                    WORKSPACE
my-sandbox      claude  running  127.0.0.1:8080->3000/tcp /home/user/proj

To stop forwarding a port:

$ sbx ports my-sandbox --unpublish 8080:3000

For a service to be reachable, it must listen on all interfaces inside the sandbox, not only 127.0.0.1. Bind it to 0.0.0.0 for IPv4 or [::] for both IPv4 and IPv6; most dev servers need a flag like --host 0.0.0.0 to do this. On the host, --publish listens on both 127.0.0.1 and ::1, so a client resolving localhost might pick IPv6 and fail with "connection reset by peer" if the sandboxed service only listens on IPv4 — even when http://127.0.0.1:<port>/ works. To fix that, bind the service to [::], or pin the published port to one family with --publish 8080:3000/tcp4 or /tcp6.

Published ports survive restarts: sbx re-publishes them when the sandbox or the daemon restarts. Explicit host ports are reused, while a port published with an OS-assigned host port (such as --publish 3000) gets a new host port on each start, so check sbx ports my-sandbox to find it. If an explicit host port is already in use at restart, the CLI or the dashboard prompts you to choose another. Removing the sandbox releases its ports.

You can't publish ports at create time — there's no --publish flag on sbx run or sbx create, so publish them once the sandbox is running. To stop forwarding, --unpublish 8080:3000 removes a single mapping, and --unpublish 3000 removes every host port mapped to sandbox port 3000.

Accessing host services from a sandbox

Services running on your host are reachable from inside a sandbox using the hostname host.docker.internal. Use this instead of 127.0.0.1 or your machine's local network IP address, which are not reachable from inside the sandbox.

The sandbox proxy translates host.docker.internal to localhost before forwarding the request, so you must add the localhost address with the specific port to your network policy allowlist:

$ sbx policy allow network localhost:11434

Then use host.docker.internal in any configuration or request that points at the host service. For example, to verify connectivity from a sandbox shell:

$ curl http://host.docker.internal:11434

Rolling out to a team

When rolling sandboxes out across a team, two features handle different needs:

  • Custom templates and kits let you package reusable agent configurations, MCP servers, base images, and per-project policies. Every developer pulls them down with their workspace.
  • Organization governance lets admins define network and filesystem rules in the Docker Admin Console. The rules apply across every developer's sandboxes and take precedence over local policy. Available on a separate paid subscription.

Customization gives developers shared starting points. Governance gives admins centralized enforcement.

What persists

While a sandbox exists, installed packages, Docker images, configuration changes, and command history all persist across stops and restarts. When you remove a sandbox, everything inside is deleted — only your workspace files remain on your host. To preserve a configured environment, create a custom template.