Pi Coding Agent

Coding agent CLI with session history and a browser terminal.

Overview

This template runs the Pi coding agent inside a container that exposes a browser terminal. You open a URL, authenticate, and get a bash shell with the pi CLI already installed. Upstream describes it as a coding-agent CLI with read, bash, edit and write tools plus session management: so a session you start now can be picked up later from the same URL.

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 @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent pinned to an exact version. Nothing floats on latest, so a restart gives you the same environment. ttyd carries one patch: its startup log prints credential: ** instead of your sign-in encoded in base64, so reading the service's logs does not reveal the terminal password. Versions before 0.8.3 logged it on every start, and upgrading does not remove those lines from the log history: if you ran one, set a new ADMIN_PASSWORD before you upgrade.

What you get by hosting it

• An HTTPS URL for the terminal, with no port forwarding or tunnel to manage.
• A persistent volume mounted at /data. HOME is set to /data/home, so session history, CLI config and any repositories you clone survive restarts, redeploys and version upgrades.
• The terminal credentials kept as service variables rather than baked into the image, so you can change them later without rebuilding anything. They are yours, not ours: the template ships no credential of its own, and both values are visible in the deploy form and in the service's variables.
• 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

• A username and a password of your choosing for the terminal sign-in. There is no default: the deploy form starts with both fields empty and will not submit until you fill them.
• A model provider key if you want it present from the first boot. Any one of the three below is enough, and none is also fine: you can add a key from inside the terminal instead.

Configuration

Both credentials are required and neither has a default, so the deploy form starts empty and refuses to submit until you supply them. Together they must stay under 186 bytes (username:password): past that, ttyd 1.7.7 starts normally and then answers 401 to everyone including you, so the entrypoint stops the container instead of leaving you with an unreachable terminal.

Pi reads a provider key straight from the environment and picks its model accordingly. It recognises more than thirty providers (Gemini, DeepSeek, Groq, Mistral, Kimi and so on); the three above are the ones this template puts on the deploy form, and the rest work just as well as service variables or configured from inside the terminal.

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

Pick the password like it guards a shell, because it does. What it protects is a root shell that can run anything and holds whatever API keys you gave it, so whoever has the URL and this password has all of that. Both fields can be changed later from the service's variables.

After deploy

1. Open the service URL. The browser asks for HTTP basic auth: the ADMIN_USERNAME and ADMIN_PASSWORD you deployed with.
2. You land in a bash shell in /data/home.
3. Run pi. Configure a model provider key if you did not set one as a variable.
4. Configuration and session history persist. Because HOME is on the volume, ~ survives restarts, so a session started before a redeploy is still there afterwards.
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

• Architectures: linux/amd64 and linux/arm64. The node base image, the ttyd release asset and the npm package are all available for both.
• Upstream: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi
• Package: @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent
• ttyd: https://github.com/tsl0922/ttyd
• License: MIT (upstream package).