#Sandbox Info & Capabilities

The sandbox routes report aiod's environment and its current capabilities. Capabilities come from probing each subsystem, so the report tracks the live runtime rather than a fixed manifest.

A missing subsystem degrades a capability. The request still succeeds. Results are cached; repeated polling is cheap.

The v1 and v2 routes side by side are in Migration from 1.x.

#Read the environment

A client's first request asks where it is, which runtimes are installed, and which planes have a backend:

curl "$BASE_URL/v2/sandbox"

curl "$BASE_URL/v1/sandbox"

Both responses contain the same environment fields:

• workspace_dir, workspace — two names for one value: the daemon account's home, where a command that names no working directory runs
• version — the daemon version
• detail.system — os, os_version, arch, user, timezone, occupied_ports, and the same two workspace fields
• detail.runtime — python and nodejs, each an array of {ver, bin, alias}
• detail.utils — the tools found on PATH, grouped into categories such as editors, network, and search

detail.system.sandbox_user appears only where the image bakes an unprivileged account; it reports the {name, uid, gid, home} that account actually resolved to.

occupied_ports is read from /proc/net/tcp, so it lists listening ports on Linux and is empty on every other platform.

The workspace is not configurable, and there is no --workspace flag. workspace_dir is the account's home.

#Capability snapshot and branching

These docs call a family of related interfaces a plane: commands, files, terminals, code, browser, and desktop. Read the snapshot once and branch on its capability fields before calling a plane.

curl "$BASE_URL/v1/capabilities"

Each fact a client needs at startup is one field:

The snapshot is organized in groups:

Three entries carry a probed status: browser (the browser plane), computer (the desktop plane), and code_interpreter (the code plane). Each has status, missing, and warnings. missing names what keeps the plane from ready; warnings explains a partial answer. status is:

• ready — the plane responds normally
• degraded — the dependencies are present, but the plane does not respond, as with a browser executable whose CDP port is silent
• absent — nothing to work with; code_interpreter uses this and ready only

On a host without a browser, the browser plane looks like this:

"browser": {
  "cdp": false,
  "cdp_endpoint": "http://127.0.0.1:9222",
  "executable": null,
  "executable_source": null,
  "missing": [
    "browser executable",
    "cdp"
  ],
  "process": true,
  "status": "absent",
  "warnings": [
    "browser process detected but CDP is unreachable"
  ]
}

Read the snapshot and branch on it:

sb = Aio(BASE_URL)

info = sb.get("/v2/sandbox")
caps = info["capabilities"]

print(info["workspace_dir"], info["version"])
# /Users/USER 0.9.1
statuses = {name: caps[name]["status"]
            for name in ("browser", "code_interpreter", "computer")}
print(statuses)

if caps["browser"]["status"] != "ready":
    print("browser unusable:", caps["browser"]["missing"])

import httpx

info = httpx.get(f"{BASE_URL}/v1/sandbox").json()
caps = httpx.get(f"{BASE_URL}/v1/capabilities").json()["data"]

print(info["workspace_dir"], info["version"])
# /Users/USER 0.9.1
statuses = {name: caps[name]["status"]
            for name in ("browser", "code_interpreter", "computer")}
print(statuses)

if caps["browser"]["status"] != "ready":
    print("browser unusable:", caps["browser"]["missing"])

A plane whose backend is absent keeps its routes and answers 503, with a hint for the fix:

{
  "data": null,
  "hint": "Ensure the browser capability is ready (GET /v1/capabilities).",
  "message": "Browser screenshot unavailable: list targets: error sending request for url (http://127.0.0.1:9222/json/list)",
  "success": false
}

Branch on the snapshot rather than on a 404: an absent plane still routes, so the status code alone cannot tell a missing backend from a wrong path.

Results are cached for 5 s, and the daemon probes once at startup, so the first read has a snapshot. A stale snapshot returns immediately and a new probe runs in the background. GET /v1/capabilities?refresh=true waits for the new probe; GET /v2/sandbox never re-probes on demand, so a forced re-probe goes through /v1/capabilities. The browser probe is a single GET /json/version with a 300 ms budget.

#Installed packages

The daemon lists the globally installed Python and Node.js packages.

data is a text listing, not a structured one. Python comes from pip list on the interpreter the code plane resolved, one - name==version line each. Node.js comes from npm list -g --depth=0, under a header line:

Node.js Packages:
  - agent-browser@0.34.0
  - npm@10.5.0
  - pnpm@7.33.7

The same listing is the MCP tool sandbox_get_packages, whose language argument is python or nodejs and defaults to python. See MCP.