Ephemeral CI / test environment (Box)

Use this when you need a clean, throwaway environment to test a repo, run a CI job, or reproduce a bug — identical every time, with nothing left behind. Every run starts from a fresh VM with all toolchains preinstalled, so there's no "works on my machine" drift.

Why Box

• Pristine + reproducible — fresh VM per run; no leftover state.
• Batteries included — Docker + Node/Python/Go/Rust/Java/etc. already there; repo auto-clones in.
• Cheap per run — per-second billing; a test run costs cents, and you box delete after.

Prereqs

curl -fsSL https://box.ascii.dev/install | sh, then box login "$BOX_API_KEY" --json. (Select the repo to auto-clone in the dashboard, or clone it in setup.)

Recipe

box_id="$(box new --json | jq -r 'select(.event == "ready") | .id')"
trap 'box delete "$box_id" --json' EXIT
box ssh "$box_id" -- "cd /project && npm ci && npm test"
box ssh "$box_id" -- "cat /project/junit.xml" > junit.xml      # pull results back

Limits

EU-only; 100 active VMs soft cap. For thousands of <500 ms parallel CI shards, dedicated CI runners scale further; Box is best for full-machine, Docker-capable, reproducible runs.