Ephemeral ci environment

Skill ariana-dot-dev/cloud-sandbox-vm-skills/skills/ephemeral-ci-environment

Get a clean, reproducible ephemeral environment for CI and testing — a fresh root Ubuntu VM with every major toolchain and Docker preinstalled, your GitHub repo auto-cloned in, and the whole thing thrown away after. Per-second billing makes each run cost cents. Use to run tests, reproduce a bug, or validate a build in a pristine environment without polluting the host.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add ariana-dot-dev/cloud-sandbox-vm-skills --skill ephemeral-ci-environment

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

1.6 KB, 333 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Ephemeral CI / test environment (Box)

Use this when you need a clean, throwaway environment to test a repo, run a CI job, or reproduce a bug — identical every time, with nothing left behind. Every run starts from a fresh VM with all toolchains preinstalled, so there's no "works on my machine" drift.

Why Box

Pristine + reproducible — fresh VM per run; no leftover state.
Batteries included — Docker + Node/Python/Go/Rust/Java/etc. already there; repo auto-clones in.
Cheap per run — per-second billing; a test run costs cents, and you box delete after.

Prereqs

curl -fsSL https://box.ascii.dev/install | sh, then box login "$BOX_API_KEY" --json. (Select the repo to auto-clone in the dashboard, or clone it in setup.)

Recipe

box_id="$(box new --json | jq -r 'select(.event == "ready") | .id')"
trap 'box delete "$box_id" --json' EXIT
box ssh "$box_id" -- "cd /project && npm ci && npm test"
box ssh "$box_id" -- "cat /project/junit.xml" > junit.xml      # pull results back

Limits

EU-only; 100 active VMs soft cap. For thousands of <500 ms parallel CI shards, dedicated CI runners scale further; Box is best for full-machine, Docker-capable, reproducible runs.

What ships with it

Read from the repository

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