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The web terminal opens an interactive shell inside a running instance of an application’s web process or background worker, from the dashboard. Use it to inspect files and environment variables, run a one-off script or a database migration, or debug a process. It’s the closest thing to SSH on Sevalla: there’s no SSH access to instances.

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Before you begin

  • The process must have a running, ready instance. A process with 0 instances, a crashing process or a suspended application has nothing to connect to.
  • Cron jobs and jobs can’t be opened: they only run on their schedule or around deployments.
Anyone who can view the application can open a web terminal in it, and the shell has the same access as the process, including its environment variables. Give access to the application with care.

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Open a terminal

1

Open the Web terminal tab

In the sidebar, click Applications, then click the application. Click the Web terminal tab.
2

Pick the process and shell

Pick the Process (the web process is selected first) and the Shell: sh, bash or zsh.
3

Run commands

When the status reads Connected, type in the terminal.
The Web terminal tab with the shell and process pickers, a Connected status and a bash sessionThe Web terminal tab with the shell and process pickers, a Connected status and a bash session
How the session works:
  • Which instance. The terminal connects to one ready instance of the process. With more than one instance, you can’t pick which one.
  • Shells. sh is always available. bash and zsh work only if the image contains them; otherwise the terminal says the shell isn’t available in this process.
  • Switching. Changing the process or the shell starts a new session in that process; the current one ends.
  • Environment. The shell sees the process’s runtime environment variables; run printenv to list them. For images built with Buildpacks, the shell starts through the buildpack launcher, so the language runtimes are on the PATH.
  • Output. What you run in the terminal doesn’t appear in the runtime logs.

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What persists

The terminal runs inside the instance’s container, so it changes only that instance:
  • Files you create or change are lost when the instance restarts or the application is deployed again, unless they’re on a disk.
  • Other instances of the process don’t see the change.
  • Processes you start from the terminal stop when the session ends.
Make lasting changes in your repository or environment variables, and deploy.

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Find language tools in a Nixpacks image

In images built with Nixpacks, language tools live under /nix/var/nix/profiles/default/bin/ (for example /nix/var/nix/profiles/default/bin/node), and Python packages are installed in a virtual environment in /opt/venv. To run Django or other Python commands, activate it first:

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When a session ends

The status reads Disconnected when a session ends, with the reason and a Reconnect button. An instance that restarts, for example during a deployment or after a crash, ends every session open in it.

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Run a command without a terminal

To run one command from a script or an AI agent, use the Run a command in a process API operation. It runs a single command in a running instance and returns its output and exit code:
  • The command is an argument list (["ls", "-la", "/app"]) run without a shell, so pipes, redirects and && don’t work. Wrap it as ["sh", "-c", "…"] when you need them.
  • It waits up to 15 seconds by default and 60 seconds at most.
  • An API key with read access can run only read-only commands such as ls, cat, env, ps and grep; a key with write access can run any command.
For an interactive session from your own tools, connect to the Open terminal session (WebSocket) operation. It also accepts the dash, ksh, csh and tcsh shells.