Shell-Cell Documentation

💡 The Core Idea

Shell-Cell is a lightweight containerized shells orchestrator that turns simple YAML blueprints into instant, isolated shell sessions.

It could be really handy, when you want to have secure, isolated place for your development.

🏛️ Architecture concepts

1. The Blueprint (scell.yml).
   Everything starts with the configuration file. It defines your Shell-Cell targets (the environment layers).

2. Shell-Cell targets.
   Think of targets as named function, instead of one giant, monolithic Dockerfile, Shell-Cell encourages you to break your setup into logical pieces.

3. “Shell Server” Model.
   Unlike a standard container that runs a single task and exits, a Shell-Cell is designed to hang. By using the hang instruction, the container stays alive in the background, acting as a persistent server. This allows you to attach multiple Shell-Cell sessions to a warm, ready-to-use environment instantly and preserving the container’s state across different sessions.