Boxed

The Sovereign Code Execution Engine for AI Agents. Run untrusted code safely—locally or in the cloud—using Docker, Firecracker, or Wasm.

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The Story 📖

Building an AI Agent that writes code? You have a problem.

• Run it locally? 🚨 Security Risk. One rm -rf / and your laptop is gone.
• Run it in cloud? 💸 Expensive. AWS instances for every user?
• Use SaaS sandbox? 🐌 Vendor Lock-in. High latency and data privacy concerns.

Meet Boxed. The open-source, sovereign engine that gives your Agents a safe place to play. It provides a unified API to spawn ephemeral sandboxes, execute arbitrary code, and retrieve results instantly.

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✨ Features

• 🔒 Secure by Default — Defense-in-depth isolation (Docker now, Firecracker planned).
• 🛡️ API Authentication — Hardened endpoints with API Key support.
• ⚡ Sub-second Startup — Ephemeral environments ready in milliseconds.
• 📁 First-class Artifacts — Auto-magic handling of generated files (images, PDFs, datasets).
• 🔌 Polyglot SDKs — First-class support for TypeScript and Python.
• 🌐 Network Control — Strict egress filtering to keep your network safe.

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🚀 Getting Started

📋 Prerequisites

To run Boxed locally, you'll need:

• Go 1.22+ (for the Control Plane)
• Rust 1.75+ (for the Agent)
• Docker Desktop (running and accessible)
• Standard Images: Ensure you have a base image like python:3.10-slim pulled:

  docker pull python:3.10-slim

Note

First Run: The first sandbox creation may take a few seconds while Docker pulls the required images. Subsequent runs are near-instant.

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🏗️ Local Development

We provide a Makefile to simplify the build process.

# 1. Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/akshayaggarwal99/boxed.git
cd boxed

# 2. Build everything (Agent + CLI)
make build

# 3. Start the Control Plane with Auth
export BOXED_API_KEY="super-secret-key"
./bin/boxed serve --api-key $BOXED_API_KEY

# Cleanup build artifacts
make clean

🔐 Security & Auth

Boxed uses a Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) model. Since you run your own instance, you define the secret key yourself at startup.

You can set the key via the --api-key flag or BOXED_API_KEY environment variable:

All CLI commands and SDKs must provide this key:

./bin/boxed list --api-key $BOXED_API_KEY

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💻 CLI Usage

# Run interactive REPL (Sticky Session)
./bin/boxed repl <sandbox-id> --lang python

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🔌 SDKs

TypeScript

# Local install
npm install ./sdk/typescript

Python

# Local install
pip install -e ./sdk/python

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💻 SDK Examples

Python

from boxed_sdk import Boxed

client = Boxed(base_url="http://localhost:8080", api_key="super-secret-key")

# Create a secure session
session = client.create_session(template="python:3.10-slim")

# Run unsafe code
result = session.run("print('hello from boxed')")
print(result.stdout)

# Cleanup
session.close()

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📚 Documentation

• REST API Reference — Detailed specification of all endpoints.
• OpenAPI Spec — Raw OpenAPI 3.0 definition.

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🛠️ Architecture

Boxed uses a Control Plane vs Data Plane architecture.

• Control Plane (Go): High-performance REST API with Auth middleware.
• Agent (Rust): Lightweight (~5MB) binary injected into every sandbox to manage lifecycle and streaming.

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🗺️ Roadmap

• Phase 1: Enterprise Edition (Docker Backend, SDK)
• Phase 1.5: Sticky Sessions (REPL Mode, WebSocket Proxy)
• Phase 1.6: Security Hardening (Auth, CSRF Protection)
• Phase 2: SaaS Edition (Firecracker MicroVMs)
• Phase 4: Public Tunneling (*.boxed.run)

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🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read our Contributing Guide.

📄 License

MIT License — do whatever you want with it.