Daytona

Daytona provides hosted sandboxes with process and filesystem operations. Once creates one sandbox for each action that misses the cache, transfers declared inputs, runs the command, retrieves declared outputs, and deletes the sandbox.

Configure An Image

Choose a Linux container image that contains the stable tools shared by your actions. A Vitest workflow can use a pinned Node.js image:

[infrastructures.remote_tests]
kind = "daytona"
image = "node:22.18.0-bookworm"

[infrastructure.execution]
provider = "remote_tests"

Once asks Daytona to build the sandbox environment from that image. The image must provide tar. Repository dependencies remain declared action outputs and inputs, so changing a package lock invalidates the correct action.

Authenticate

Set the provider access key outside the script:

export DAYTONA_API_KEY=...

ONCE_DAYTONA_API_KEY takes precedence when both variables are present. Once does not forward the key to the action process.

Run

Use the workspace default:

once exec --remote -- node --version

Or select the provider for one invocation:

once exec --remote --compute remote_tests -- node --version

An annotated script can select it with:

# once remote "remote_tests"

See Remote Execution for a two-action Vitest example.

Daytona's command endpoint returns standard output and standard error as one combined result. Once exposes that result as standard output.

Lifecycle

Once marks each Daytona sandbox as ephemeral and sets immediate deletion after stop. It also sends an explicit delete request after success, command failure, timeout, or transfer failure. The ephemeral policy is a provider-side safety net if the client disappears first. Daytona describes this behavior in its sandbox lifecycle guide.

The sandbox receives an automatic stop interval derived from the action timeout, with extra time for provisioning and transfers. Actions without an explicit timeout use Daytona's short-lived execution policy.

Self-hosted or test endpoints can override the control and toolbox addresses with ONCE_DAYTONA_CONTROL_URL and ONCE_DAYTONA_TOOLBOX_URL.