Skip to main content
Freestyle provides performant ephemeral VMs that are full linux systems. Freestyle is ideal when you want to give your AI a whole computer, not just run code snippets. This guide shows the full end-to-end flow: use the Mesa SDK outside the sandbox to set up resources, then use the Freestyle SDK to configure and mount Mesa inside the sandbox. The general flow for any sandbox integration is:
  1. Outside the sandbox — use the Mesa SDK (TypeScript or Python) to create repos, sign a short-lived access token, and orchestrate your workflow.
  2. Inside the sandbox — install the mesa CLI, pass the token in as MESA_ACCESS_TOKEN, and run mesa mount --daemonize.
  3. Run your agentcd into the mount path and launch your agent (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, or a custom agent). Any file edits are automatically persisted back to Mesa.
For details on FUSE setup, system dependencies, and container configuration, see POSIX Mount.

Setup

The example uses two environment variables:

Example Code

Freestyle sandboxes are Debian-based by default, so the standard Mesa install script works out of the box.
The layout scopes the token: it can reach the repositories the layout declares and nothing else. A plain mesa mount then shows exactly those repositories under the organization browse tree. To mount the layout’s own paths instead, serialize workspace.layout() with JSON.stringify(...) in TypeScript or json.dumps(...) in Python, write it into the sandbox, and mount with mesa mount --layout <file>.

Tips

  • Mint the token outside the sandbox. Sign a short-lived, scoped access token with your private key outside the VM and pass only that token as MESA_ACCESS_TOKEN. Your private key never crosses the sandbox boundary. See Authentication for details.
  • Pick a TTL that covers the session. Tokens default to a 15 minute TTL and max out at 4 hours, and a mount keeps the token it started with for its whole lifetime. If the token expires mid-session, filesystem operations in the VM start failing with authentication errors; mint a fresh token on the host and remount.
  • Install Mesa ahead of time when startup time matters. Installing at runtime is fine for a demo, but preinstalling Mesa and its dependencies makes VM startup faster and more predictable.
  • Always use --daemonize. This keeps Mesa mounted while your shell or agent continues to run.
  • Don’t forget user_allow_other. See POSIX Mount for the most common FUSE setup issue in sandbox environments.
  • Expect mount paths to depend on the VM user. In this example the VM runs as root, so Mesa mounts under /root/.local/share/mesa/mnt.