instabox-demo

npx instabox-demo@latest sh

Signs you in to instabox in your browser (first run only; Google by default, --github for GitHub), starts a box on your own instabox account, drops you into it over SSH, lights up your tile on the demo board, installs the instabox CLI (macOS/Linux; skip with --no-cli), and installs two agent skills, instabox and instabox-snapshots, into ~/.claude/skills and ~/.agents/skills (skip with --no-skills).

How it works

• bin/instabox-demo.mjs (the npm package) runs instabox's loopback sign-in (RFC 8252 + PKCE) and saves the tokens in ~/.instabox-demo.json. It creates the box with your token (pauses itself after 2 hours; the next run finds it on instabox by its demo=instabox-demo tag and resumes it, from any laptop), makes a throwaway ed25519 key, gets an SSH certificate for it, and runs ssh.
• It calls the board's POST /api/lights twice: stage: creating (tile pops in amber) and stage: running with the box id (tile goes green). The server checks the token with instabox (/v1/me, GET /v1/machines/{id}) and never stores it. Tiles dim at the box's self-delete time.
• server/ (InstaCloud project instabox-demo, compute app + postgres db) records each person in leads and serves the board at /. It still serves POST /api/boxes for 0.1.x clients, which create boxes on the shared account in INSTABOX_API_KEY.

Server config (insta secrets set …)

| Name | Default | | | --- | --- | --- | | INSTABOX_API_KEY | | ibk_ key of the shared account (0.1.x clients only) | | ADMIN_TOKEN | | unlocks the board | | BOX_IMAGE | universal | official image name or im_ ID | | BOX_TTL_MINUTES | 120 | | | MAX_ACTIVE_BOXES | 50 | global cap on live boxes | | PER_IP_PER_HOUR | 5 | new boxes per IP | | PUBLIC_BOARD | | 1 shows names and boxes without the token (never emails) |

Deploy: insta deploy server --port 8080. Point the CLI elsewhere with INSTABOX_DEMO_URL.