Getting Started

Introduction

heyo gives you portable micro-VM sandboxes for AI agents. Spin up an isolated environment in milliseconds, run untrusted code or a full agent inside it, then fork, snapshot, or move it between machines. Run everything locally on your own hardware, or publish your sandboxes to the Heyo network.

The product is delivered as two binaries built from the mvm-ctrl crate:

  • heyvm — the user-facing CLI, TUI, and local HTTP API. It creates and runs sandboxes through a set of pluggable virtualization backends.
  • heyvmd — a small always-on daemon that publishes your local heyvm API to the Heyo cloud over an iroh QUIC tunnel, so sandboxes on your machine are reachable from anywhere.

How the pieces fit together

  heyvm CLI / TUI ──▶ local HTTP API ──▶ backend driver ──▶ micro-VM / sandbox
        │                   ▲
        │                   │ (publishes over iroh)
        └── heyvmd ─────────┘ ──▶ Heyo cloud  ◀── other machines
  • heyvm talks to a backend driver (Firecracker, libvirt/KVM, Docker, Apple Virtualization, bubblewrap, WASM, and more) to actually boot and manage sandboxes.
  • The same operations are exposed over a local HTTP API so editors, scripts, and the desktop app can drive sandboxes programmatically.
  • heyvmd keeps that API registered with the cloud control plane, which adds multi-machine networking and deployed sandboxes.

Heyo Web Services

Heyo Web Services (HWS) is the open-source stack that builds a cloud on top of heyvm: a load balancer and autoscaler for microVM deployments, secrets, observability, an artifact store, CI, Postgres, a queue and an MCP server, all running on hosts you control. Start with the HWS overview or go straight to installation.

Where to go next