Quickstart

Sign up at https://my.pols.so/signup with your email address. There is no password: pols sends you a login link, valid once for 15 minutes. New accounts are approved by hand; you get an email when yours is ready.

Once approved, open your account page and create an API key. Copy it right away: its secret is shown only once. See API keys for expiry and revocation.

curl -fsSL https://pols.so/install.sh | sh

The script installs pols to ~/.local/bin (set POLS_INSTALL_DIR to choose another directory) and checks the download against its published checksums. If Claude Code is installed and you run the script in a terminal, it also offers to install the pols skill and register the MCP server; press Enter to accept.

pols login
# paste the API key and press Enter
pols org

pols login checks the key against the API and stores it in your user config directory, readable only by you. pols org shows your org, its quotas and what it uses. To avoid storing the key, export POLS_API_KEY instead; it takes precedence over a stored key.

pols new --name demo --size small

The command waits until the sandbox runs, which takes about ten seconds, and prints its ID (sbx_...). You can use the ID or the name demo everywhere.

pols exec demo -- uname -a
pols exec demo -- bash -lc 'git clone https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World && ls Hello-World'
pols exec demo --root -- apt-get update

Output streams as it arrives and pols exits with the command’s exit code. Use bash -lc '...' for pipes, cd and &&. See Commands and files.

pols cp ./notes.md demo:/home/user/notes.md
pols cp demo:/home/user/Hello-World/README ./README

pols stop demo     # keeps the disk; stopped time is not billed
pols resume demo   # boots it again from the same disk
pols rm demo       # deletes the sandbox and its disk for good