Drives
A drive is a persistent Linux environment in the cloud — your own machine with an NVMe disk, pre-installed tooling, and a full shell. It starts in under two seconds and picks up exactly where you left off.
What is a drive?
A drive is a dedicated Linux machine running on Fly.io infrastructure. Unlike a container that resets on each run, a drive's filesystem is backed by an NVMe volume — your git repos, installed packages, shell history, and environment variables persist across restarts.
Every organisation starts with one drive. You can create additional drives for separate projects, isolated agent workloads, staging environments, or anything else that benefits from its own persistent filesystem.
/workspace and your home directory
survives stop/start cycles. Only /tmp is cleared between sessions.Drive sizes
Starter
1 shared CPU · 2 GB RAM · 10 GB NVMe. Available on Free and Plus plans. Good for personal projects, documentation, and lightweight dev work.
Standard
2 dedicated CPUs · 4 GB RAM · 40 GB NVMe. Available on Team and Scale plans. Recommended for most software projects and agent workloads.
Performance
4 dedicated CPUs · 8 GB RAM · 80 GB NVMe. Available on Scale plan. For large monorepos, parallel agent runs, and compute-heavy builds.
Custom
Need more CPU, RAM, or disk? Contact us. We can provision drives up to 16 CPUs and 32 GB RAM on dedicated hosts.
Drive lifecycle
- 01 Start
Click Start on a drive card or open the workspace. The machine boots in under two seconds. A terminal tile opens automatically on the canvas.
- 02 Running
The drive is live. All terminals, agents, and processes have full access to the filesystem and network. Your teammates see the drive as active in their workspace.
- 03 Idle stop
After 10 minutes of no terminal activity the drive idles down automatically. Your files and state are preserved. The next session restarts it in seconds.
- 04 Manual stop
You can stop a drive from the workspace settings or the drive card. All running processes are gracefully terminated before the machine halts.
Storage
The NVMe volume is mounted at /. Your home directory (/root or /home/user depending on the image) and /workspace are both on the
persistent volume. Installed packages (apt, pip, npm -g)
survive restarts.
The capture journal and session recordings are stored in /workspace/.shelltab-cloud/capture/ and synced to central storage asynchronously.
You don't need to manage this directory — ShellTab handles it automatically.
Pre-installed tooling
Every drive starts with a standard set of developer tools so you don't need to spend time bootstrapping a new environment:
Languages & runtimes
Node.js (nvm), Python 3, Go, Rust (rustup), Ruby, Java (sdkman)
Shell tools
git, curl, wget, jq, ripgrep, fd, htop, tmux, vim, nano
Cloud CLIs
AWS CLI v2, gcloud SDK, flyctl, wrangler, gh (GitHub CLI)
Build tools
make, cmake, gcc, clang, docker (via host socket), docker-compose
Managing multiple drives
Each drive in your organisation is visible to all members. You can create one drive per project, one for dedicated agent runs, one for staging, or any other division that suits your team. Drives are listed in the workspace sidebar and on your organisation dashboard.
You can rename, stop, or delete a drive from its settings panel. Deleting a drive is permanent and destroys the NVMe volume — export anything you need before deleting.