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Kiste is operated through one CLI. Install it, log in, and you have a full x86 dev machine — SSH, native command execution, port forwarding, SCP, and a streamed Linux desktop in the browser.

Quickstart

Terminal

$ curl -fsSL https://kiste.run/install.sh | sh
$ kiste login
$ kiste new my-box  # 4 vCPU · 8 GB RAM · 80 GB disk
$ kiste shell my-box
$ kiste exec my-box -- npm test
$ kiste desktop my-box  # full Linux desktop in the browser
$ kiste stop my-box  # pauses to disk, resumes in under a second

What's in every machine

Ubuntu 24.04 with GNOME and 22 preinstalled toolchains: Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, JVM languages, Ruby, PHP, .NET, R, C/C++ toolchains, Docker, Chrome, and popular coding agents — with zero package downloads at start.

Webhooks

Create an endpoint in the console under Webhooks. Every delivery is an HTTPS POST with a JSON body and a Kiste-Signature header of the form t=<unix seconds>,v1=<hex>. Verify it by computing HMAC-SHA256 over "{t}.{raw body}" with the endpoint's secret (shown once when you create it), comparing in constant time, and rejecting timestamps older than five minutes.

verify.py

$ import hmac, hashlib, time
$ t, v1 = dict(p.split('=') for p in sig.split(',')).values()
$ expected = hmac.new(secret, f'{t}.'.encode() + body, hashlib.sha256).hexdigest()
$ assert hmac.compare_digest(expected, v1) and time.time() - int(t) < 300

Deliveries retry after 1 m, 5 m, 30 m, 2 h and 12 h, may arrive out of order and may repeat — deduplicate on sequence. Endpoints must be public HTTPS on port 443; redirects are not followed. Subscribe to alert.raised to receive every account alert as well.

Alerts

Machine errors, failed environment setups, failed snapshots, a disk crossing 90 %, a failing webhook and an exhausted monthly budget each raise an alert. Alerts always land in the console and on webhooks; email per kind is switched under Alerts and requires the deployment to have an SMTP relay configured.

Full reference

The complete API and CLI reference is rolling out to this page. Until then, email us and we'll get you productive the same day.