Developer Stations

Learn how to provision, run, manage, and connect to persistent Developer Stations via SSH.

Developer Stations are fully persistent, non-ephemeral cloud VM instances designed for long-running processes, hosting remote databases, and interactive coding sessions. Unlike ephemeral runs, the station's files, libraries, configuration, and state are preserved indefinitely.

Executing the 'machine station' command displays a rich interactive selection menu. The following options are available inside this workspace controller:

• Create a new persistent station: Prompts you with the machine tier selection list. Generates or reuses a persistent station keypair, spins up the VM on Google Cloud Platform, configures key authorized SSH access, and registers the new Station ID.
• Connect to an active station (SSH): Fetches your active running persistent environments from the database registry. Selecting a station establishes an interactive terminal SSH tunnel and launches a remote bash console instantly.
• Delete/terminate an active station: Shuts down the selected VM instance, terminates GCP billing resources, and updates the database state.

When connecting, the BlueMachine CLI configures the SSH protocol parameters automatically. It generates a persistent public/private keypair (saved in ~/.config/bluemachine/) and runs a native SSH sub-process to connect you directly to the machine.

Compute charges are billed down to the second while the station is in the running state. If you stop the station, compute billing immediately drops to $0.00.