Understanding the Devbox State Machine

Devboxes represent a persistent dev environment that can be launched and shut down as needed. Over the course of a Devbox’s lifecycle, it will transition through a series of states depending on your use case:

  • provisioning: Runloop is allocating and booting the necessary infrastructure resources.
  • initializing: Runloop defined boot scripts are running to enable the environment for interaction.
  • running: The Devbox is ready for interaction.
  • suspending: The Devbox disk is being snaphsotted and as part of suspension.
  • suspended: The Devbox disk is saved and no more active compute is being used for the Devbox.
  • resuming: The Devbox disk is being loaded as part of booting a suspended Devbox.
  • failure: The Devbox failed as part of booting or running user requested actions.
  • shutdown: The Devbox was successfully shutdown and no more active compute is being used.

Suspending and Resuming Devboxes to Save Disk State

In addition to use idle management configuration, you can also manually suspend and resume a devbox.

Only disk state, not in-memory state is preserved during suspend/resume operations

1

Suspend the devbox

2

Resume when needed

3

Wait for the devbox to be running again

Important Notes

  • Suspended Devboxes still incur storage charges until explicitly shut down
  • The suspend/resume process typically takes seconds, depending on the amount of modified data
  • Daemons or other processes running at suspend time must be manually restarted after resuming
  • The original Devbox ID and SSH keys are preserved through suspend/resume cycles