Pads
The unit of a cloud development environment.
A Pad is a single cloud development environment. It runs in an isolated Firecracker microVM with its own CPU, memory, filesystem, and network. You create Pads with pad up, work in them over SSH or via pad exec, and destroy them with pad down.
Each Pad has:
- An alias, a human-readable name used in CLI commands.
- A state (see below).
- A visibility, either
user(private to the creator) ororganization(shared with every member of the owning org). Set it in the Padfile (visibility = "...") at create time, or change it later withpad update. - Zero or more exposed ports, each with a public preview URL.
- An environment built from its Padfile, Template, and secrets.
Lifecycle
A Pad moves through these states:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
pending | Create request received. |
provisioning | A VM is being allocated on a Host. |
starting | The VM booted and setup commands are running. |
ready | The Pad is live and accepting connections. |
stopping | Graceful shutdown in progress. |
stopped | Paused. Restart with pad start. |
destroying | Destruction in progress. |
destroyed | Permanently removed. |
interrupted | Host went away unexpectedly (e.g. spot interruption). Disk state is preserved; the Pad recovers when a replacement host attaches. |
When something goes wrong (a boot failure, a host outage, etc.), the Pad rolls back to a rest state with its field set. Status always describes the Pad's physical state — there is no separate "failed" status. User-script (setup/start command) failures are reported in .