Shells
The Shells section gives you a terminal in your browser, connected to a shell running on the machine where the engine runs.
The Shells explorer
Shells live in the Shells section of the left explorer sidebar, on screens 768px and wider.
- Header: a refresh button re-lists your shells.
- Empty state: when there are none, the section shows "No shells yet" / "Sessions opened or resumed here" with a New shell button.
- New shell: available from the empty-state button, the section's right-click menu, and the Resources menu in the menu bar.
- Shell node: shows a terminal icon, the shell's identity, and when it was created. Clicking it opens (or resumes) the session as a tab in the secondary pane, which you can expand to fullscreen. A node's right-click menu offers Delete.
Creating a shell
New shell opens a session immediately — there are no options to fill in. The engine launches the host's default shell:
| Host OS | Shell |
|---|---|
| Linux | /bin/bash |
| macOS | /bin/zsh |
| Windows | C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe |
The session runs on the host machine, with the same environment and working directory as the engine.
A running step in the Workflows diagram adds a second kind of session: its Shell button opens a terminal inside that step's container, listed here alongside the host shells.
The terminal
The terminal:
- Resizes automatically with the pane
- Follows the console's light/dark theme and scale
- Resumes the running session when you reopen it
Sessions
- A shell's state is one of
created,executed,failed,killed,exited. - Delete removes a single shell (from the node's right-click menu).
See the Shell CLI reference and Shell API for scripting and additional options (the API/CLI accept an optional path and args when creating a shell).