daytona-shell

daytona-shell

Interactive shell over a temporary Mesa repo running inside a Daytona sandbox, written in TypeScript.

Spins up a Daytona sandbox from an image with Mesa installed, creates and mounts a temporary repo via FUSE, and drops you into a minimal shell. Commands execute inside the sandbox against the mounted filesystem.

See also: daytona-python-shell for the Python version.

Quick start

npm install

# Create a .env in this directory (gitignored)
cp .env.example .env

# Now populate your .env file with the required values

# Run
npm start

Creating Daytona sandbox...
Mounting Mesa...
Connected to ~/.local/share/mesa/mnt/acme/daytona-123456789. Type "exit" or Ctrl+C to quit.

$ printf 'Hello from Daytona and Mesa!\n' > hello.txt
$ cat hello.txt
Hello from Daytona and Mesa!
$ exit
Cleaning up sandbox and temporary repo...
Bye!

How it works

1. Builds a Daytona image with Mesa and its FUSE configuration.
2. Creates a temporary Mesa repo and a Daytona sandbox.
3. Mints a 30-minute access token restricted to the temporary repo.
4. Passes MESA_ORG and MESA_ACCESS_TOKEN only to the mesa mount command. The private key never enters the sandbox.
5. Starts the FUSE daemon (mesa mount --daemonize), then drops you into a REPL in the mounted repo.
6. Deletes the sandbox and temporary repo when the shell exits.

By default, MesaFS mounts every repo the access token can access. Since this token is restricted to the temporary repo, that is the only repo in the mount.

Environment variables

Variable	Description
MESA_PRIVATE_KEY	Mesa signing private key stored only in the trusted host process
DAYTONA_API_KEY	Daytona API key (get one here)

Requirements

• Node.js >= 18
• Mesa account with a signing key
• Daytona account with an API key