Quickstart

Get a terminal session running in under a minute.

1. Sign up

Go to moltshell.sh and sign in with your Google account. No credit card required.

2. Launch your VM

After signing in, you land on the Dashboard. Your sandbox card shows the current state of your VM.

If this is your first time, your VM will be provisioned automatically. This takes about 60 seconds. You will see the state change from "starting" to "started".

If your VM was previously suspended (after being idle), click Start to resume it. Resuming takes about 30 seconds.

3. Open the terminal

Once your VM is running and the server is ready, a Launch Terminal button appears on the dashboard card. Click it to open the terminal view.

You are now connected to a full Linux shell running on your VM. The default session is a tmux session, so your work persists even if you close the browser.

4. Start working

Try a few commands to explore your environment:

# Check the system
uname -a
cat /etc/os-release

# See what's installed
node --version
python3 --version
git --version

# Create a project
mkdir ~/my-project && cd ~/my-project
git init

5. Split the terminal

Click the split buttons in the pane header to divide your terminal:

• The vertical split icon (two columns) splits side by side
• The horizontal split icon (two rows) splits top and bottom

Each pane runs its own independent terminal session. Drag the divider between panes to resize them.

Next steps

• Learn about your VM environment
• Set up AI coding tools
• Run a web application and preview it in your browser