What is Hopbox

Hopbox is a self-hosted, vendor-neutral control plane for development environments. You run one control plane (hopboxd); it gives you persistent, reproducible workspaces — containers on Docker or pods on Kubernetes — that you reach from anywhere over native SSH or host-routed HTTPS.

The model

  hopbox (CLI / VS Code)
        │  gRPC
        ▼
  ┌───────────────┐        reverse dial        ┌──────────────┐
  │   hopboxd     │  ◀───────────────────────  │  workspace   │
  │  control plane│                            │   + agent    │
  └───────────────┘                            └──────────────┘
   store · reconciler · agent hub · gateway

• Workspaces dial out. The agent inside each workspace opens a connection to hopboxd and keeps it. The control plane never routes into compute — so workspaces work behind NAT, inside a private cluster, anywhere with outbound network. SSH and HTTPS both ride that one reverse connection.
• Declarative core. A reconciler drives each workspace from its observed status toward its desired spec and heals drift — the Kubernetes controller pattern, with no Kubernetes dependency. State lives in a store.
• Swappable providers. Six versioned contracts — Compute, Storage, Ingress, Identity, Build, Metering — each with conformance tests. Ship the defaults (Docker, local FS, subdomain ingress, static identity) or bring your own; the core never imports a vendor SDK.

What you get

• hopbox create a workspace from any OCI image, on Docker or Kubernetes.
• Native SSH to it (and VS Code, scp, rsync) via short-lived certificates.
• Host-routed HTTPS for web apps — every workspace port gets a URL.
• Multi-user isolation: each person owns their boxes and keys; auth via static tokens or OIDC SSO.

Next

• Quickstart — running in a few minutes.
• SSH & VS Code · Auth & multi-user

Status

Hopbox is at v0.1. The architecture and access model documented here are stable; build providers beyond prebuilt and additional ingress schemes (raw TCP port-forwarding) are in progress and will be documented as they land.