mc-sandbox

Builds and publishes the Mission Control sandbox golden AMI — a pre-baked public AMI (owned by the AgentSystemLabs AWS account) with every sandbox tool preinstalled: Node 24, pnpm, the GitHub CLI (gh), the Mission Control agent, and the Claude Code / Codex / OpenCode / cursor-agent CLIs.

Mission Control launches customer sandboxes from this AMI so an AWS sandbox boots in ~30–60s instead of running apt/npm on every boot (~3–6 min). When no AMI exists for a region/arch, Mission Control falls back to running the install script at boot.

How it fits together

mc-sandbox (this repo, your AWS account)        Mission Control (customer's account)
────────────────────────────────────────       ────────────────────────────────────
scripts/install.sh  ──┐                          fetch manifest from academy
packer build          │  bake → copy regions       (bundled fallback if offline)
  → make AMI public   │  → make public            resolve AMI for region/arch
build-ami.mjs         │                           verify AMI owner == manifest.owner
  → manifest.json  ───┴── POST ─▶ academy        launch FROM ami + slim boot user-data
                          /api/golden-ami/manifest (else: Ubuntu base + install.sh)

The image bakes only the secret-free scripts/install.sh. Per-instance secrets — the agent API key and the self-signed TLS cert — are written at boot by Mission Control's cloud-init, never baked, which is why the AMI is safe to publish publicly.

scripts/install.sh is vendored from Mission Control's renderInstallScript() (scripts/remote-vm.mjs) so a golden boot and the full-install fallback converge. If the install steps change there, regenerate this file and re-bake.

Publish via CI (recommended)

Push a release tag (v*, e.g. v2026.06.07-1) — the Build & publish golden AMI workflow runs only on tags, never on branch pushes or PRs, so a billable bake is always a deliberate release. The image version is taken from the tag (v1.2.3 → 1.2.3). It bakes the AMI for us-east-1/x86_64, makes it public, and uploads the manifest to academy.

git tag v2026.06.07-1 && git push origin v2026.06.07-1

Required repo secrets:

Secret	Purpose
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID / AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	Creds for the publishing AWS account (493255580566). Needs ec2 run/stop/terminate, create-image, modify-image-attribute, describe-*, keypair + security-group.
ACADEMY_MANIFEST_TOKEN	Bearer token matching academy's GOLDEN_AMI_MANIFEST_PUBLISH_TOKEN.

Account-level prerequisite: Block Public Access for AMIs must be disabled in each target region (aws ec2 disable-image-block-public-access --region <r>), otherwise the make-public step fails.

Publish locally

# Requires packer + aws CLIs and AWS creds for the publishing account.
node scripts/build-ami.mjs --version 2026.06.06-1 --regions us-east-1

# build + upload to academy in one step:
ACADEMY_MANIFEST_TOKEN=… node scripts/build-ami.mjs --version 2026.06.06-1 \
  --regions us-east-1 --upload-url https://agentsystem.dev/api/golden-ami/manifest

Flags: --version (required), --regions (csv, default us-east-1), --arch (x86_64|arm64), --instance-type, --agent-version (defaults to the latest published agent), --out (default dist/golden-ami-manifest.json), --upload-url, --dry-run.

Cadence

Re-bake weekly and on each agent release; bump --version. Mission Control treats a newer manifest version as authoritative. Deregister superseded AMIs after a grace window (clients pin the exact AMI id from the manifest).