Dev Environments

A dev environment per engineer. Forked from one template.

A new hire commits on day one, with no setup drift across the team.

One template

New hire to first commit in a day.

You configure the stack once. Every engineer forks the same image, including Docker, your services, your secrets, and any seeded databases. Their machines are byte-identical.

one template · every engineer
production-stacktemplate
postgres 14redis 7node 20docker 24nginxseeded db
fork × 5
sarah
mark
jensen
alice
tom
Every engineer, identical stack. Byte-level. Nothing left for drift.

Preview per PR

A live URL for every PR, opened by every teammate.

Each pull request gets its own forked machine with the full stack running, including the database. The URL goes into the PR and tears down on merge. No preview-env YAML, no staging queue.

open prs · live previews
main
├─#1247fix: auth timeoutpr-1247.boxd.shrunning
├─#1251feat: dashboard redesignpr-1251.boxd.shrunning
├─#1252chore: bump depspr-1252.boxd.shsleeping
└─#1248fix: memory leakpr-1248.boxd.shmerged
Every PR its own full stack. Real DNS, real HTTPS. Teardown on merge.

Persistent & self-hosted

It keeps running after you close your laptop. You can also host it yourself.

Long builds, seeded databases, and uploaded fixtures survive between sessions. Machines sleep at €0/hr when idle and resume in 8ms. The same binary runs on your own KVM host without Postgres or Kubernetes, and your code stays inside your network.

self-host footprint
boxd
boxd · 1 rust binary
~24 MB
any KVM host
no DB · no k8s
gitpod / coder
kubernetes
postgres
redis
traefik
minio / s3
prometheus
~2-4 GB · 6 services
needs k8s cluster
Same product. Different ops burden. Drop a binary, skip the control plane.
<60ms
to fork a full machine
1
binary to self-host
0
managed services needed

boxd vs. the cloud dev environments you already know

boxdCodespacesGitpodcoder.com
Persistent stateYesVolumePartialYes
Fork from any stateYesNoNoNo
Ops to self-host1 binaryK8s + DBK8s + DB
IsolationKVMContainerContainerVM/Container
InterfaceSSHVS Code WebVS Code WebWeb + SSH

Related use cases

Stop spending engineer-months on environment setup.

Talk to us about your team's stack, or boot a machine yourself with one SSH command.

read the docs · see pricing · ssh boxd.sh