NVIDIA OpenShell Developer Guide

NVIDIA OpenShell is the safe, private runtime for fleets of autonomous AI agents. It provides sandboxed execution environments that protect your data, credentials, and infrastructure. Agents run with exactly the permissions they need and nothing more, governed by declarative policies that prevent unauthorized file access, data exfiltration, and uncontrolled network activity.

New in OpenShell 0.1.x: a stable release cadence, new isolation primitives, and an expanded extension surface, along with much more.

See our upgrade guide for everything that’s changed.

Get Started

Install OpenShell and create your first sandbox in two commands.

$ curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NVIDIA/OpenShell/main/install.sh | sh

$ openshell sandbox create

Refer to Run Your First Agent for the complete image, provider, and policy workflow.

Explore

About OpenShell

Learn about OpenShell and its capabilities.

Concept

Run Your First Agent

Prepare an image, attach providers, and launch an agent in a sandbox.

Tutorial

Tutorials

Hands-on walkthroughs from first sandbox to custom policies.

Concept

Gateways and Sandboxes

Deploy gateways, create sandboxes, configure policies, providers, and workload images for your AI agents.

Concept

Inference

Attach model providers to selected sandboxes and call their native endpoints without exposing credentials.

Concept

Observability

Understand sandbox logs, access them with the CLI and TUI, and export OCSF JSON records.

How-To

Policies

Define filesystem, process, and network controls for sandbox workloads.

Reference

Security Best Practices

Every configurable security control, its default, and the risk of changing it.

Concept

Notice and Disclaimer

This software automatically retrieves, accesses or interacts with external materials. Those retrieved materials are not distributed with this software and are governed solely by separate terms, conditions and licenses. You are solely responsible for finding, reviewing and complying with all applicable terms, conditions, and licenses, and for verifying the security, integrity and suitability of any retrieved materials for your specific use case. This software is provided “AS IS”, without warranty of any kind. The author makes no representations or warranties regarding any retrieved materials, and assumes no liability for any losses, damages, liabilities or legal consequences from your use or inability to use this software or any retrieved materials. Use this software and the retrieved materials at your own risk.