Sandbox Lifetimes

Sandboxes are intentionally ephemeral. They boot in milliseconds, serve their purpose, and disappear—reducing the blast radius of untrusted code and removing infrastructure chores. Still, you can control exactly how long a sandbox stays alive and even reconnect later when debugging is required.

Default lifetime: "session" Jump to heading#

await using sandbox = await Sandbox.create();

With no options set, the sandbox lives for the duration of your script. Once the Sandbox instance is closed, the microVM shuts down and frees all resources. This keeps costs predictable and prevents orphaned infrastructure.

Duration-based lifetimes Jump to heading#

Provide a duration string to keep a sandbox alive after the client disconnects:

const sandbox = await Sandbox.create({ lifetime: "5m" });
const id = sandbox.id;
await sandbox.close(); // process can exit now

// later
const reconnected = await Sandbox.connect({ id });

Supported suffixes: s (seconds) and m (minutes). Examples: "30s", "5m", "90s". Use this mode for manual inspection, SSH debugging, or when a bot needs to resume work mid-way.

If you require a longer lifetime, it is possible to promote a duration-based sandbox to a Deno Deploy app using sandbox.deploy().

Forcefully ending a sandbox Jump to heading#

• await sandbox.kill() immediately stops the VM and releases the lifetime if you need to tear it down before it would naturally expire.
• Killing a sandbox invalidates exposed HTTP URLs, SSH sessions, and any attached volumes, but this also happens automatically when your code drops the last reference to the sandbox or the configured duration elapses.

Extending the lifetime of a sandbox Jump to heading#

Coming soon.

Related APIs Jump to heading#

• Sandbox.create() – pass the lifetime option when provisioning.
• Sandbox.connect({ id }) – resume control of a duration-based sandbox.
• Sandbox.kill() – terminate early.
• Expose HTTP and Expose SSH – note that their URLs/credentials die with the sandbox lifetime.