Codex

OpenAI's lightweight coding agent in a browser terminal.

Overview

This template runs Codex, OpenAI's terminal coding agent, inside a container that exposes a browser terminal. You open a URL, authenticate, and get a bash shell with the codex CLI already installed. Upstream describes it as a lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal; this template gives that terminal a URL and a disk.

The image is built from the Dockerfile in this directory: node:24-bookworm-slim (pinned by digest) plus ttyd 1.7.7 (verified against a pinned SHA-256) and @openai/codex pinned to an exact version. Nothing floats on latest, so a restart gives you the same environment.

What you get by hosting it

• An HTTPS URL for the terminal, with no port forwarding or tunnel to manage.
• A 1 GiB volume mounted at /data. HOME is set to /data/home, so your CLI login, shell history, and any repositories you clone survive restarts, redeploys, and version upgrades.
• The terminal password stored as a managed secret rather than baked into the image.
• Deploys are health-gated: a container that does not answer is rolled back to the last healthy image instead of leaving you with a dead URL.

What you need before deploying

• Nothing mandatory. The access password is generated for you if you leave it blank.
• Optionally, an OpenAI API key: otherwise you sign in from inside the terminal with codex login.
• Optionally, a Git token if you plan to clone private repositories.

Configuration

Set by the template, not by you: HOME=/data/home (puts your home directory on the volume).

After deploy

1. Open the service URL. The browser asks for HTTP basic auth: username admin, password ACCESS_PASSWORD. If it was generated, read it from the service's variables.
2. You land in a bash shell in /data/home.
3. Run codex. If you did not set OPENAI_API_KEY, run codex login first and follow the prompts.
4. That login persists. Because HOME is on the volume, the CLI's config survives restarts: you do not re-authenticate after every deploy.
5. Clone your repository into /data/home (or anywhere under /data) so your work persists too. Files written outside /data are lost when the container is replaced.

Links

• Upstream: https://github.com/openai/codex
• Package: @openai/codex
• ttyd: https://github.com/tsl0922/ttyd
• License: Apache-2.0 (upstream openai/codex).