Atelier

Isolated dev environments that boot in seconds, not minutes.

Self-hosted Firecracker microVM sandboxes — real VM isolation, instant snapshots, one CLI.

Batteries Included

Each sandbox is a complete development environment — VS Code, AI agent, and browser, accessible from any device.

• code-server — VS Code in the browser, zero local setup
• OpenCode — AI coding agent, launch tasks and review results from anywhere
• Chromium via KasmVNC — full browser inside your sandbox for previewing, testing, debugging
• Verdaccio — private npm registry shared across all sandboxes

Spawn a sandbox, push a task to OpenCode, close your laptop. Review the results from your phone on the ski lift — or wherever you happen to be.

Features

• Two base images out of the box — dev-base ships with Node 22 and Bun; dev-cloud extends it with AWS CLI, Google Cloud SDK, and kubectl
• Workspace definitions — configure git repos to clone, init commands, dev commands, exposed ports, secrets, and resource limits per workspace
• OpenCode config replication — define OpenCode configuration globally or per workspace, automatically replicated to every sandbox
• Auth synchronization — OAuth tokens are synced across all running sandboxes so you authenticate once and every instance just works (may violate ToS of some providers)
• Package cache — Verdaccio runs on the host as a shared npm registry, caching packages for npm, bun, pnpm, and yarn across all sandboxes
• SSH access — use your regular workflow: SSH, VS Code Remote SSH, JetBrains remote — the sandbox is a real Linux VM
• Multi-dev per sandbox — nothing stops multiple developers from working in the same sandbox simultaneously
• Task dispatch — create coding tasks from the dashboard, Atelier spawns a sandbox, creates a git branch, launches OpenCode with your prompt, and tracks progress. An AI task queue for your team
• Session templates — 4 built-in AI workflows (Implementation, Best Practices Review, Security Review, Simplification) with customizable models, effort levels, and prompt templates per workspace
• Dashboard — mission control for all your sandboxes: real-time task progress, running dev servers, and an attention feed aggregating OpenCode permission and question requests across every session
• Dev commands with auto HTTPS — define dev commands in your workspace config (e.g. npm run dev on port 3000) and get a public https://dev-{name}-{id}.your-domain.com URL with streaming logs

Why Atelier?

Most sandbox tools use containers — fast, but with weak isolation boundaries. Atelier uses Firecracker microVMs (the technology behind AWS Lambda) to give each sandbox hardware-level isolation while keeping boot times fast via LVM copy-on-write snapshots.

• VM isolation — each sandbox is a real virtual machine, not a container namespace
• Instant cloning — LVM thin snapshots clone a full environment in <5ms
• Prebuilds — run expensive setup once, snapshot the filesystem, spawn instantly from there
• Simple operations — single CLI, no Kubernetes, no complex orchestration

Quickstart

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/frak-id/atelier/main/infra/scripts/install.sh | bash

After install:

atelier manager status

Requirements

• apt-based Linux distro (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) with systemd
• Bare‑metal KVM (/dev/kvm present)
• x86_64 CPU
• A domain with wildcard DNS (*.your-domain.com → server IP)
• Ports 80 and 443 open for HTTPS

Key Commands

Command	Description
atelier init	Full install (config + setup + update + images)
atelier update	Download + install server bundle
atelier images build dev-base	Build base image
atelier manager status	Manager health check
atelier debug-vm start	Test VM for validation

Configuration

Default config path: /etc/atelier/sandbox.config.json Override with ATELIER_CONFIG=/path/to/sandbox.config.json

If you pre‑fill setup.storage or setup.network in the config, the CLI will skip prompts during atelier init.

Local Development

No server or KVM needed — the manager runs in mock mode:

bun install
ATELIER_SERVER_MODE=mock bun run dev
# API:       http://localhost:4000
# Swagger:   http://localhost:4000/swagger
# Dashboard: http://localhost:5173

Documentation

• Setup Guide — installation and configuration
• Architecture — system design, components, and diagrams
• Infrastructure — networking, storage, domains, and deployment
• Constraints — critical gotchas that will save you hours
• Code Patterns — conventions for contributors

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup and guidelines.

Security

See SECURITY.md for vulnerability reporting.

License

MIT