Valet is a self-hosted control plane for running coding agents in the cloud style, on hardware you own: Claude Code and Codex sessions, each in its own container (“thread”), managed from one web interface. It is aimed at the same slot as hosted agent services, in its own words, and it installs as one docker compose project on a Linux server or a Mac, with Docker Engine 24 or newer and Compose v2. MIT licensed, weeks old, and actively pushed.
What running it looks like
You clone the repository, fill in a small .env (database password, a secret key, a login password), build the sandbox profile and bring the stack up. The interface listens on port 3000, and every environment variable is documented in the sample file. From a settings page you connect your accounts: a Claude setup-token, a Codex sign-in or an OpenAI or Anthropic API key, and optionally a GitHub token for private repositories and pull requests. On a domain, you point a wildcard certificate at the box and services get their own subdomains; Coolify deployment is documented step by step, including the proxy label setting you need to turn off.
Each project carries a small .valet folder: a setup script that runs once after the clone, a resume script that runs on every wake, and a services.yaml that declares the processes to keep alive, with an optional browser flag and health path. Inside a sandbox, a valet command starts, lists, logs, restarts and removes those services, and valet url <port> gives you the address.
The security note is the honest part
The README says it plainly: the core component holds the Docker socket, only the web component publishes a port, and agents have sudo inside their container, so a sandbox should be treated as untrusted beyond its repository. It goes one step further for cloud hosts and gives you the iptables rule that blocks the instance metadata endpoint, which is what an agent with root inside a container would otherwise read to borrow the host’s cloud credentials. That is a clearer-eyed paragraph than most young projects write.
My read
The category is filling fast: this week alone brought Valet and pi pod, two different answers to “run the agents on my own box.” What recommends Valet is the shape: compose-first, no Kubernetes, accounts and tokens wired through a settings page, and a security section that reads like the author has actually thought about what sudo inside a container means. What tempers it is the same thing as every project this young: it is weeks old, lightly used, and one bug away from being a story about leaked tokens. Read the security note before you point it at repositories that matter.
Source: the repository.