Terminal sessions

Launch a coding agent directly on a Railway cloud agent and work with it through your terminal. Railway CA gives you one place to browse your machines, start sessions, and return to work that's still running.

The coding agent and its terminal interface run on the Railway machine. Your computer connects over SSH; your code, tools, and session processes stay on the cloud agent.

To manage these machines in Herdr, use the Herdr setup guide.

Start a session

Follow the quickstart prerequisites to enable Cloud Agents, install the Railway CLI, and sign in. Then choose a coding agent:

Railway creates or reuses a cloud agent, carries available credentials, and opens the session in Railway CA. Add --new to start with a fresh machine and disk:

railway code --claude --new

Railway Agent uses the Railway credentials already on the machine. Other coding agents can use eligible sign-ins from your computer or ask you to authenticate on the agent. See credentials and configuration.

OpenCode's remote action runs both its client and server on the cloud agent. Without remote, the command prepares a server and offers to connect a client on your computer.

Choose an agent interactively

Open the Railway CA menu to browse machines and sessions or start a new one:

railway ca

The launch picker includes the coding agents above and a shell.

Save your default coding agent, project, and skills preferences with:

railway ca setup

Running railway code without an agent flag uses that preference. If OpenCode is your default, it offers the local-client flow; use an explicit --opencode remote command for a session inside Railway CA.

Work with a repository

A new machine starts in /app. You can ask the coding agent to clone a repository and work in it, or open a shell:

railway ca ssh <agent-name> -- bash

Then clone your project:

cd /app
gh repo clone OWNER/REPOSITORY

Launching from a local repository does not upload its source files. See give it a project for the first-task walkthrough.

Manage and return to sessions

Inside Railway CA, press Option+F to show the agent tree and Option+N to start another session. Each machine shows its existing sessions beneath its name. Select a running session to return to it.

A terminal disconnect leaves the machine and its active sessions running. Open railway ca again to reconnect. Exiting the coding agent itself ends that session's process.

Stop compute when you're finished:

railway ca sleep <agent-name>

Sleep keeps the disk and stops running processes. After waking the machine, start a new process to continue; saved history depends on the coding agent. See manage agents and sessions.

Additional installed tools

The development image also includes pi, Cursor CLI, and Factory Droid. These are available from a shell and use their own sign-in flows. The Railway CLI's launch picker and automatic credential transfer cover the agents listed above.

Open a shell with railway ca ssh <agent-name> -- bash, then run pi, cursor-agent, or droid. Complete the tool's authentication on the cloud agent as needed.

Connect a local app instead

You can also use Railway as a remote environment for Claude Desktop, Codex Desktop, or OpenCode Desktop and local terminal clients. Choose that path when you want to work through an app on your computer.