Managing your sandbox
Your sandbox has a small state machine and a single control point: the sandbox status badge in the top bar.
Status badge
The badge is always visible in the top right of the app. Its colour tells you what's going on:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| not provisioned | Nothing has been created yet |
| stopped | Sandbox exists but isn't running |
| starting | A start / restart is in flight |
| running | Ready to accept tool executions |
| auth failed | Local sandbox couldn't authenticate (bad token) |
Click the badge to start, stop, restart, or refresh the sandbox.
Starting a sandbox
Hit Start and the backend will:
- Generate a fresh short‑lived auth token
- Launch the container (local) or ask Daytona to start it (cloud)
- Wait for the health check to pass
- Return the sandbox URL to your browser
First start on a cold sandbox takes a few seconds. Subsequent starts are faster because images are cached.
Stopping and restarting
Stop shuts the container down cleanly. You can keep a sandbox stopped indefinitely — the backend remembers which sandbox belongs to you and will reuse it next time.
Restart is equivalent to Stop → Start. Useful if a tool has left state you'd like to clear, or if something feels stuck.
Cloud sandboxes also auto‑stop after ~10 minutes of idleness to save resources. They restart automatically the next time you use a tool.
Switching between Cloud and Local
Go to Settings → Sandbox:
- Cloud — managed for you, no setup. Recommended default.
- Custom URL — point artifuncs at a sandbox you run yourself (see Self‑hosted sandbox).
Switching is instant. Your tool definitions live on the backend, so nothing is lost — the new sandbox will pull the archives it needs the first time you run each tool.
API keys
Self‑hosted sandboxes need an API key to authenticate against the backend. You can manage keys under Settings → API keys:
- Create a key, copy it once (it won't be shown again), paste it into your sandbox's environment
- Revoke a key at any time — any sandbox using it will immediately start failing with "Auth failed"
- Keys are hashed at rest; artifuncs never stores the plaintext
Cloud sandboxes use internally‑issued tokens and don't need an API key.