n8n/.devcontainer/codespaces

Cloud agent sessions (Codespaces)

Run long-lived, human-steered agent sessions (Claude Code / OpenCode) on a GitHub Codespace instead of your laptop: start a task, close the lid, steer it from anywhere with a terminal, resume tomorrow.

This is a separate devcontainer config from the laptop one in .devcontainer/ — it ships both agent CLIs, tmux for session persistence, and Playwright system deps, on the same Postgres sidecar setup.

One-time setup (~5 min)

1. Add your key at github.com/settings/codespaces → New secret → name ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, repository access n8n-io/n8n. (Alternative for Max subscriptions: CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN from claude setup-token.)

2. Give the GitHub CLI the codespace scope:

   gh auth refresh -h github.com -s codespace
   

Daily flow

pnpm session              # attach the default agent session (creates everything on first run)
pnpm session fix-flaky    # a second, parallel agent in its own git worktree
pnpm session ls           # what's running
pnpm session stop         # end of day: billing stops, disk survives
pnpm session rm           # delete the codespace

• Detach with Ctrl-b d — the agent keeps working without you.
• Reattach by running the same pnpm session <name> from any machine.
• Each named session gets its own worktree (/workspaces/wt-<name>, branch session/<name>), so parallel agents never touch each other's tree. Builds in fresh worktrees are cache-hits via a shared turbo cache.
• First codespace creation takes ~20 min uncached (image + full build). After that, sessions attach instantly; new worktrees cost a pnpm install (~1–2 min).

What survives what

Event	Running processes	Disk (checkout, worktrees, chat history)
Detach / close laptop / network drop	✅ keep running	✅
Stop, or idle timeout (default 30 min, max 4 h)	❌ killed	✅
Delete (pnpm session rm)	❌	❌ (push your branches first)

After a stop, pnpm session <name> restarts the codespace (~30–60 s); run claude --resume (or --continue) inside to restore the conversation from disk.

Gotchas (learned the hard way)

• Codespaces clones the repo to /workspaces/n8n, not /workspaces — workspaceFolder here differs from the laptop config on purpose.
• A failing onCreateCommand is fatal: Codespaces discards the container and drops you into a minimal recovery container (no node, no CLIs). If your codespace has nothing installed, check /workspaces/.codespaces/.persistedshare/creation.log.
• gh codespace ssh needs sshd inside the container — provided by the sshd devcontainer feature, don't remove it.
• User secrets aren't visible in ssh shells by default: the codespace agent injects them into VS Code sessions only; they're delivered base64-encoded to /workspaces/.codespaces/shared/.env-secrets. The image's profile shim exports them for ssh/tmux sessions.
• Codespaces on this repo (public) bill to your personal account by default — the free tier is 120 core-hours/month. Org billing, bigger machines, and prebuilds (which remove the ~20 min cold start) require org admin enablement.

Costs

You pay only while the codespace runs: ~$0.36/hr (4-core) / ~$0.72/hr (8-core), ~nothing stopped. pnpm session stop when you leave; the idle timeout is the backstop, not the plan.