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Auto-stop

You don’t have to shut a sandbox down yourself, because each one has an idle limit and a hard cap. When you disconnect, the sandbox stops after the idle limit, its workspace is saved, and the next droneship run claude in that repo starts on it.

Terminal window
droneship run claude                   # stops after 30m with nobody connected, or at 8h
droneship run claude --idle 2h         # allow a longer break
droneship run claude --idle 0          # no idle stop; the hard cap still applies
droneship run claude --timeout 90m     # a shorter hard cap

The two limits

Section titled “The two limits”
Limit Default Flag Stops the sandbox
Idle 30 minutes --idle (0 turns it off) After this long with nobody connected
Hard cap 8 hours --timeout At this age, even if you’re connected

Both take durations such as 8h or 90m, or plain seconds, up to 24 hours. An --idle longer than --timeout is refused, because it could never fire. If you set only a --timeout shorter than 30 minutes, the idle limit shrinks to match.

The idle clock counts connections, not agent activity. While your terminal is attached, the sandbox is in use, even if you’re only reading. The clock starts when you disconnect. So if you want Claude to keep working after you close the terminal, raise --idle for that session, or hand the work off as a task with -p, which runs until the agent finishes.

A task (droneship run claude -p) stops when the agent finishes, and the hard cap still applies.

What’s kept

Section titled “What’s kept”

When a sandbox stops, its work is kept, except with --ephemeral:

  • Interactive sandbox. Its workspace is saved: the repo’s files, Claude’s conversations, shell history and package caches. The next droneship run claude in that repo starts a new sandbox on it, and droneship resume claude picks a conversation to continue. With --ephemeral, nothing is saved.
  • Task. Its sandbox is snapshotted when it stops. droneship list -a keeps it for 7 days, and droneship resume claude <id> restores it.

A workspace lasts until you run droneship workspace delete or launch with --fresh.

See when it stops

Section titled “See when it stops”
  • CLI. droneship list -a shows an interactive sandbox that ended in the last day, with how it ended (idle, time limit, killed) and whether its workspace was saved.
  • Console. The Sandboxes list has an Auto-stop column, such as after 30m idle · max 7h 59m. The sandbox page says the same in a sentence, for example “Auto-stops after 30m idle, or in 7h 59m at the latest”.

To stop one now, droneship kill <id>. Its workspace is kept.

More: Resume your work, Workspaces, droneship run.

Next

Section titled “Next”