Sandboxes

A macOS app for managing Docker Sandboxes.

Features

• See the details of your sandboxes, including resource usage, network traffic, and the network and file system rules that apply to them.
• Create new sandboxes quickly and easily.
• Create and manage sandbox environment files and use them to create sandboxes.
• Start, stop and remove sandboxes.
• Publish a sandbox's ports on your Mac when creating it or later, open them in your browser, and unpublish them.
• Open an interactive shell inside a sandbox in your terminal.
• Run a sandbox's agent in your terminal, or open any sandbox in Claude Desktop.
• Get notified when an agent makes a network request that needs approval, and approve or deny across the current or all sandboxes.
• Manage global and sandbox specific secrets.
• Manage global and sandbox specific network rules.
• Manage MCP servers, and create sandboxes in dynamic MCP mode, static mode with chosen servers, or with none.
• Manage agent skills and choose how sandboxes share them.
• View and change sbx settings, such as proxies and kit policy, and restart the daemon when a change needs it.
• Install, upgrade and sign in to sbx from the app, and run diagnostics to find problems with your setup.
• Install new versions of Sandboxes from inside the app.

Getting started

Requirements

• macOS 26 or later
• The sbx CLI. Install it with Homebrew: brew install docker/tap/sbx
• sbx v0.48.0 or later to unload MCP servers from a sandbox.
• sbx v0.50.0 or later to choose and show kit host mounts.
• sbx v0.51.0 or later to create a sandbox with no MCP servers.
• sbx v0.51.0 or later to save disk sizes in environment files.
• sbx v0.51.0 or later to set a built-in agent's kit arguments, since earlier versions don't run built-in agents from kits.
• sbx v0.51.0 or later to choose where additional workspaces are mounted.
• sbx v0.51.0 or later to show the kits a sandbox was built with.
• An sbx with the experimental sbx skills commands (checked against v0.49.1) to manage skills.
• Claude Desktop v2.110.0 or later, to open sandboxes in Claude Desktop. Create the sandbox with the Claude Code agent so it has Anthropic credentials and network access.

Install

Run this in Terminal to install the latest release into Applications, or to update an existing install:

curl -fsSL https://geofflamrock.github.io/Sandboxes/install.sh | bash

The script is site/install.sh. It downloads the latest release's DMG, quits Sandboxes if it's running and copies the app into /Applications, asking for your password only if you can't write there. A download made with curl doesn't have the quarantine flag, so you can skip Allow the app to run.

Or install it by hand:

1. Download the latest Sandboxes-<version>.dmg from GitHub releases.
2. Open the DMG and drag Sandboxes onto Applications.

Allow the app to run

If you installed the app by hand: Sandboxes isn't notarized by Apple yet, so the first time you open it macOS blocks it with a message that it can't check the app for malicious software. To allow it:

1. Open Sandboxes from Applications and click Done on the warning.
2. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security.
3. Scroll down to the message that Sandboxes was blocked and click Open Anyway.
4. Click Open Anyway again and enter your password when asked.

You only need to do this once. Updates installed from inside the app aren't blocked. Alternatively, clear the quarantine flag in Terminal after copying the app to Applications:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Sandboxes.app

Or download the release with the GitHub CLI, which doesn't set the quarantine flag at all:

gh release download --repo geofflamrock/Sandboxes --pattern '*.dmg'

Find sbx

The app looks for sbx on your login shell's PATH. If it can't find it, set its location in Settings › sbx.

Contributing

Building locally

The Xcode project is generated from project.yml with XcodeGen:

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open Sandboxes.xcodeproj

Local builds show a "Local" badge at the bottom of the sidebar and have version 0.0.0, a placeholder in project.yml (MARKETING_VERSION). CI sets the real version (see Test builds and Releases).

Update checks

Release builds use Sparkle to check for and install updates. Every 6 hours, Sparkle reads appcast.xml from the latest GitHub release, so drafts and pre-releases are ignored. When it lists a newer build, the sidebar and the menu bar menu show it, and clicking it opens Sparkle's window with the release notes and Install Update. Sandboxes › Check for Updates… and Settings › General check straight away. Sparkle downloads the DMG, checks its EdDSA signature against the public key in the app (SUPublicEDKey), replaces the app and reopens it. Updates installed this way aren't quarantined, so macOS doesn't block them.

Other builds don't check. To try it out in one, open Settings › Development and turn on Check for updates in this build. Sparkle compares build numbers, and builds from CI are numbered after the releases before them, so only a local build (build 1) sees the latest release as an update. You can also read another repository's appcast there.

These settings are stored as the UpdateCheckForceEnabled and UpdateCheckRepository defaults, so they also work as launch arguments:

open Sandboxes.app --args -UpdateCheckForceEnabled YES

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗