Background worker

Skill ariana-dot-dev/cloud-sandbox-vm-skills/skills/background-worker

Run a long-lived or 24-7 background worker in a cloud VM that won't auto-stop — queue workers, schedulers, bots, crawlers, or persistent agent loops. Disable auto-stop or set a TTL up to 30 days; the VM keeps its disk and IPv4 and resumes after a stop. Per-second flat pricing, ~10x cheaper than ephemeral sandboxes for steady-state work.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add ariana-dot-dev/cloud-sandbox-vm-skills --skill background-worker

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

3 things to look at

reads credentialsReads from 1 credential source: `$BOX_API_KEY`.
2 stars2 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.
runs commandsInstructs the agent to run 6 commands, including `curl -fsSL https://box.ascii.dev/install | sh` and 5 more.

SKILL.md

1.7 KB, 386 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Background / 24-7 worker (Box)

Use this when work must keep running unattended: a queue worker, a Telegram/Discord bot, a polling agent, a scheduled scraper, or any always-on service. Ephemeral sandboxes (E2B microVMs, Codespaces) auto-die on a timer — wrong tool. A Box can be told to never auto-stop, persists its disk, and keeps a dedicated IPv4.

Why Box

No session cap — runs hours/days/indefinitely.
Persistent + resumable — disk survives stop; box resume brings it back.
Cheap steady-state — flat per-second pricing beats ephemeral providers (50 always-on VMs ≈ $432/mo vs ~$4k+).

Prereqs

curl -fsSL https://box.ascii.dev/install | sh, then box login "$BOX_API_KEY" --json.

Recipe

box_id="$(box new --no-auto-stop --json | jq -r 'select(.event == "ready") | .id')"
box ssh "$box_id" -- bash -s < ./setup.sh
box ssh "$box_id" -- "cd /app && nohup ./worker.sh > /var/log/worker.log 2>&1 &"
box extend "$box_id" --ttl 2592000                 # optional: 30-day deadline

Survival rules

Running processes do not survive stop/resume or fork — only the disk does. Make startup idempotent and relaunch after resume; use a process manager (systemd, pm2, nohup).

Limits

EU-only; disk-level snapshots; 100 active VMs soft cap; max 30-day TTL per extension (re-extend as needed).

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.