Getting started

Sign in, create your first box, and open a terminal to it in about a minute.

boxctl gives you an on-demand box: a real, fully isolated Linux machine that boots in seconds and is destroyed when you no longer need it. You drive it either from the browser dashboard or from the boxctl command line.

A box is disposable by design. Don't keep the only copy of anything important on one: take a backup of what you want to keep. New features and fixes are listed in the changelog.

1. Sign in

Go to boxctl.io and click Sign in. boxctl uses your Google account, so there is no separate password to manage. The first sign-in creates your account.

2. Create a box

On the dashboard, give your box a name (for example build-box), optionally pick an image and a template, and click Create. The box appears in your list and boots within a few seconds.

Boxes are private to you. Nobody else can see or connect to them.

3. Connect

Click Terminal on a running box to open a shell right in the browser. You can pop the terminal out into its own window and keep working while you use the rest of the dashboard.

Some images also expose a desktop. Where available, Desktop opens a VNC session in the browser.

4. Pause, resume, or destroy

• Pause snapshots the box and stops its process. A paused box keeps its disk and can be resumed later.
• Resume brings a paused box back.
• A box nobody has used for 6 hours is paused for you. See Auto-pause.
• Delete destroys the box for good. Take a backup first if you want to keep anything on it.

Next steps

• Dashboard explains every control on the box list.
• Command line covers installing the boxctl CLI and driving boxes from your own terminal.
• AI agents shows how to use a box as the sandbox a coding agent works in.
• API tokens describes how the CLI authenticates as you and how to revoke access.
• Backups shows how to save a box and restore it later.