devctk

Frustrated by any of these?

• Running claude --dangerously-skip-permissions or codex --full-auto with your workspace, agent config, and session history in reach, hoping it doesn't touch the wrong file
• Wanting a clean env with your host's nix and mise on PATH, without writing a Dockerfile to bake them in
• Wanting an agent to do work on a remote dev box without giving it your shell history, ssh keys, or dotfiles

devctk fixes all three with rootless Podman and one TOML file. No sudo anywhere. No Dockerfiles to maintain. No daemon.

uv tool install devctk

Two patterns it nails

① Dev env — host nix/mise inside, SSH-accessible

You want a clean env that still has your host nix and mise on PATH, and your project visible at its real path. You don't want to bake a Dockerfile, and you don't have sudo. (Think distrobox, but declarative.)

Optional SSH wires it up to VS Code Remote / Cursor / ssh + nvim:

[[containers]]
name = "myproj"
image = "docker.io/library/ubuntu:24.04"
systemd = true
nix = true
mise = true

[containers.workspace]
path = "/home/you/Projects/myproj"
mirror = true

[containers.ssh]
port = 39010
authorized_keys_file = "/home/you/.ssh/container_authorized_keys"

On the laptop:

Host myproj
  HostName 127.0.0.1
  Port 39010
  ProxyJump workstation   # omit if running locally

② Agent in a YOLO sandbox — same isolation, no shared host

You want claude --dangerously-skip-permissions or codex --full-auto to do its thing without you babysitting every approval — but not with free run of your shell history, ssh keys, and unrelated projects.

devctk puts the agent in a container, with two key bind-mounts:

• ~/.claude and ~/.codex rw — logins, history, and credentials persist across container recreates
• host /nix/store and mise installs — the agent uses the same toolchain you do

[[containers]]
name = "myproj-agent"
image = "docker.io/library/ubuntu:24.04"
agents = ["claude", "codex"]
nix = true
mise = true

[containers.workspace]
path = "/home/you/Projects/myproj"
mirror = true

devctk apply → podman exec -it myproj-agent bash → run the agent unattended. Whatever it touches stays inside the container.

Bonus combo — local agent, remote dev container

The cool one. Run the agent container on your machine and the dev container on a remote (lab box, GPU server, anywhere). They meet over two channels:

• ssh — the agent shells into the remote dev container to run commands (start a training run, run tests, tail logs) and stream output back
• sshfs — the remote workspace is mounted on your host with sshfs and bind-mounted into the agent container, so the agent reads and writes remote files as if they were local

flowchart LR
  A["Agent container<br/>(your machine)"] == "ssh cmd" ==> D["Dev container<br/>(remote)"]
  D -. "files via sshfs" .-> A

Loading

The win: the agent has its own filesystem, its own user, its own dotfiles — none of which the dev box has to trust. The dev box has the GPU, the datasets, the heavy state — none of which the agent has to carry locally. It's the same decoupling Anthropic's managed-agents writeup argues for, applied to the local-vs-remote axis.

Rootless, no sudo

Everything devctk does runs as your unprivileged user:

• Podman runs rootless
• The autostart unit is a user-level systemd oneshot
• sudo loginctl enable-linger "$USER" is the only place sudo shows up, and only if you want autostart to survive a full reboot before you log in

How it works, in one paragraph

devctk reads ~/.config/devctk/config.toml, diffs it against a normalized state file, and applies the minimum plan: create a new container, recreate when a runtime field changed, start when stopped, update when only metadata changed, destroy when you removed it from config. No daemon. Whitespace and TOML formatting never force a recreate — the diff runs on semantic form. Containers marked systemd = true come back via a user-level oneshot at login/boot.

More

• QUICKSTART.md — install, systemd autostart, full config reference, apply / ls / rm lifecycle
• Requires Linux, rootless Podman, Python 3.11+, and a Debian/Ubuntu base image
• MIT licensed