Terminal

The Terminal tab on the instance page opens a fully interactive shell in your browser. Multiple tabs, mouse selection, copy/paste, scrollback. It’s a real terminal.

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Two kinds of terminal

The selector at the top of the Terminal tab chooses where the shell lands:

• Host (default), lands you as root on the VM. Full control: install packages, edit /etc/, run docker, restart services.
• An app install: lands you inside that app’s container, as the image’s USER directive (for example node for OpenClaw). Use this to run app-specific CLIs without leaving the dashboard.

You can open up to 3 concurrent sessions on the same VM. Pick a different target from the selector. Each gets its own tab.

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Session persistence

Sessions run inside tmux on the VM. That means:

• Close your laptop, come back tomorrow → reconnect into the same tmux session, with full scrollback intact.
• Run a long process, navigate away, come back → it’s still running.
• Refresh the dashboard → tabs reopen.

If you don’t want this, type exit in the terminal. It kills the tmux session.

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Useful shortcuts

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Per-app conveniences

When you select an app install:

• The CLI binary the image declares (bin in package.json for Node apps) is automatically symlinked into PATH: for example openclaw devices list works even though the image ships it as node /app/openclaw.mjs.
• Your working directory is set to the app’s WORKDIR (/app for most images).

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Security notes

• The host terminal runs as root because the VM is dedicated to your tenant. There are no co-tenants to drop privileges for.
• Per-app terminals run as the container’s configured user. Add --user 0 to a docker exec only when you have to (e.g. one-shot chown).
• All terminal traffic is encrypted between your browser and your VM.
• Closing the tab does not kill the session. Use exit if you want to.

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