Changelog #20

Devbox Updates

Devboxes are on-demand cloud development environments that run on Namespace compute. You can now create them from a spec file, snapshot and restore them, and lease them across runs using tags.

Ephemeral Devboxes

Pass --ephemeral to devbox create to get a Devbox with no persistent storage. Namespace deletes it automatically once it stops. Useful for one-off tasks or agent sessions where you do not need the environment to persist.

Devbox spec file

The Devbox spec file now supports sourcing environment variables from secrets and setting a network egress policy, alongside the existing image, size, and repository fields. Create from the spec with devbox create --from devbox.yaml.

Restore a Devbox from a snapshot

We now snapshot a Devbox each time it starts for you. The Snapshots tab now lists all of them, and you can restore to any one to roll back to an earlier state. Restoring creates a new snapshot from that point and leaves existing snapshots intact.

Lease and reuse Devboxes

devbox acquire leases a Devbox by tag, reusing an available one or creating a new one when none matches. Each lease resets to the requested git ref, so the environment starts from a known state. devbox release returns it to the pool. This is useful for agents cycling through many short-lived tasks without spinning up a new Devbox each time.

Bazel Remote Execution

Bazel's remote cache lets multiple builds share artifacts, but each build still executes actions locally. Remote Build Execution (RBE) moves the actions themselves onto remote workers, so Bazel can run them in parallel across many machines rather than sequentially on one. This makes it practical to get full parallelism out of large action graphs without scaling up a single local machine.

Bazel actions can now run remotely on Namespace compute, with low-latency access to the Namespace Bazel cache. RBE complements the existing remote cache: cache hits are still served from the cache, and misses execute on remote workers.

Remote execution is currently in early access. Please contact us or email support@namespace.so to request access.

macOS Golden Gate

Last week at WWDC, Apple announced macOS Golden Gate and Xcode 27 and within 24 hours we made it available to you in Namespace. Select it with the macos.version=27.x shape selector, or pick it from the list of supported images in the GitHub runner profile editor.

Summary

Several updates land across Devboxes, Bazel, and macOS support. Devboxes now support tag-based leasing for reuse across agent runs, ephemeral mode for stateless sessions, snapshot restore for rolling back to earlier states, and a spec file that covers secrets and egress policy alongside existing fields. On the build side, Bazel Remote Build Execution extends our existing remote cache by moving action execution onto our workers. macOS Golden Gate and Xcode 27 are available on our infrastructure, selectable via the shape selector or the runner profile editor.