AgentBox.sh

AgentBox.sh is an MIT-licensed tool by Marco D'Alia that moves a project into a dedicated sandboxed VM and launches a coding agent inside it. It supports Claude Code, Codex, Open Code and Pi, and runs boxes on local Docker, a machine you own over SSH, or cloud providers. It is driven from a CLI and a native macOS menu bar app.

What It Is

AgentBox is a sandbox manager for coding agents. A single command such as agentbox claude creates an isolated box, copies in the project workspace along with shell and editor settings, agent auth, skills and plugins, then starts the agent in a detachable tmux session. Each box can include a dedicated browser reachable via noVNC screen sharing, persistent shells, and a VS Code or Cursor IDE attached through Dev Containers.

Orchestration and Lifecycle

Multiple boxes can run in parallel. Commands cover queuing agents to start when running boxes go idle, waiting until an agent is idle, input-needed or plan-ready, reading plan questions as data, and driving prompt answers. Boxes can be paused, resumed, stopped, destroyed and checkpointed, with warm checkpoints used for fast startup of new boxes. The site describes an AgentBox skill that lets an orchestrating agent spawn and drive subagents in isolated VMs, and mentions Notion and Linear integration.

Providers and Security Model

Supported environments include local Docker, remote Docker over SSH, Vercel, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Daytona and E2B. Git credentials stay on the local machine, and pushing to a remote goes through an explicit permission request. A provider SDK lets users build custom provider plugins as npm packages.

Setup Path

Install with npm and run agentbox install. It requires macOS or Linux, Docker (Docker Desktop or OrbStack) and Node 20.10 or newer. The first box creation builds a roughly 1 GB image once. A nightly channel is available for pre-release builds.