An Agent is a persistent Linux VM running code-server, accessible in your browser at a per-Agent URL. You start one, work in it, stop it when done. Stopped Agents keep their disk; destroyed Agents are gone.
Sign up and complete onboarding
Open https://crabglamp.com and click Sign up. Clerk handles email + password and social sign-in. After verification you land on the onboarding page.
Pick a username for your personal account. The username becomes your account slug — public glamps you publish later live at crabglamp.com/{username}/{glamp-name}. Reserved slugs like dashboard and api are blocked at submit.
Click Continue. You land on /dashboard with an empty agent list.
Pick a size and a region
Click Create agent. The dialog opens in two steps.
Step 1 — name and size. Type a name (lowercase letters, digits, hyphens — example my-first-agent). Pick a size:
- Small — 2 vCPU (US: 3), 4 GB RAM, 80 GB disk. Light dev work, single agent sessions.
- Medium — 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB disk. Multi-process workloads.
- Large — 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 240 GB disk (EU: 320 GB). Heavy parallel work or large language model inference.
Step 2 — billing. Choose pay-as-you-go (metered by running and paused hours) or subscribe-and-save (one flat monthly rate). For your first Agent, pay-as-you-go is the cheapest path: you pay only for hours the Agent is actually up.
Region defaults to your nearest cell. US currently means Hetzner's US data center; EU means Helsinki. The region is fixed for the Agent's lifetime — pick the one closest to you.
Click Create. The dialog closes; the new card shows status provisioning with a step-by-step progress bar. Average provisioning time is about 60 seconds.
Open a code-server session
Once the card shows status running, click Open. A new browser tab loads code-server at the Agent's generated subdomain on hetzner-agents.crabglamp.com (the exact host is assigned at provisioning — use the Open button rather than guessing it). The first load includes a brief authentication redirect — nothing for you to configure.
You now have a full VS Code in the browser: file explorer on the left, integrated terminal at the bottom, marketplace extensions panel. The home directory is /data/home-coder — the persistent volume that survives stops, restarts, and image upgrades. Everything outside /data may be wiped on a new image.
Open a terminal and run a smoke test:
uname -a
df -h /data
crabglamp
The third command runs the on-VM CLI installed by the platform — with no arguments it prints the available commands. The CLI is how you manage virtual keys, publish glamps, and fetch OAuth tokens later.
Stop the Agent
When you are done, return to the dashboard tab and click Stop on the Agent card. The VM powers off and the disk is preserved. Note: on Hetzner the paused rate equals the running rate, so stopping does not reduce cost — it only preserves state. To stop being billed, destroy the Agent.
To stop being billed entirely, click Destroy. This is irreversible — the volume is wiped, the URL is recycled, and billing stops with any final usage landing on your next invoice.
What is next
Read the Agents reference for every size, region, API endpoint, and CLI command. To switch this Agent to a flat monthly rate, follow Switch billing type. To understand isolation and what is logged, read Isolation and logging.