Shell

Open a terminal in your application's image, with its variables and addons, without touching the instances serving visitors.

A shell starts a new container from your deployed application's image, with the same environment variables and the same addons. Look at files, open a database prompt, try a command — the instances serving your visitors are not touched, and the container is removed when the session ends.

In the console

Open the project's Shell tab and choose Open shell. The project needs a deployment first. If the connection drops, Reconnect starts a new session.

From the CLI

nesly run --tty -- bash
nesly run --tty -- psql "$DATABASE_URL"
nesly run --tty --deployment dep_3k2m… -- sh    # a specific release's image

Without --tty, nesly run runs a command non-interactively and exits with its exit code — the form for migrations and CI: see backups & commands.

Limits

A session lasts up to 15 minutes by default. From the CLI,--timeout asks for longer, up to 30 minutes — something that needs hours is a workload to deploy, not a session.
The container's disk is temporary. Files written in a shell are gone when it ends; keep data in a database or object storage (addons).
Opening a shell needs a role that may deploy the project.