# NVIDIA OpenShell Developer Guide

> OpenShell is the safe, private runtime for autonomous AI agents. Run agents in sandboxed environments that protect your data, credentials, and infrastructure.

NVIDIA OpenShell is the safe, private runtime for 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.

## Get Started

Install OpenShell and create your first sandbox in two commands.

```shell
curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NVIDIA/OpenShell/main/install.sh | sh
openshell sandbox create -- claude
```

Refer to the [Quickstart](/get-started/quickstart) for more details.

***

## Explore

Learn about OpenShell and its capabilities.

Concept

Install OpenShell and create your first sandbox in two commands.

Tutorial

Hands-on walkthroughs from first sandbox to custom policies.

Concept

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

Concept

Keep inference traffic private by routing API calls to local or self-hosted backends.

Concept

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

How-To

Policy schema, environment variables, and default policy details.

Reference

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

Concept

***

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.

## Instructions for AI Agents

- For clean Markdown of any page, append `.md` to the page URL
- For a complete documentation index, see https://docs.nvidia.com/openshell/llms.txt
- For full documentation content in one file, see https://docs.nvidia.com/openshell/llms-full.txt
- For section-specific indexes, append `/llms.txt` to any section URL
- For AI client integration (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.), connect to the MCP server at https://docs.nvidia.com/openshell/_mcp/server

## Versions

- [Latest](https://docs.nvidia.com/openshell/latest/llms.txt) (default)