Introduction

What is Iris?

Iris is an open-source infrastructure that lets you run code in secure, isolated sandboxes with instant checkpoint and fork.

Your AI agents can experiment freely, break things, and branch from any point in under a millisecond.

Quickstart Get up and running in under a minute

API Reference Explore the full SDK documentation

Key Features

Sub-millisecond Fork

Fork any running sandbox in under 1ms using copy-on-write. Zero cold starts, instant branching.

Filesystem Snapshots

Checkpoints and forks capture the full filesystem state via copy-on-write — only modified blocks are stored. Memory state is not captured.

Firecracker VMs

Hardware-level isolation using the same technology as AWS Lambda.

Simple API

Sandbox.create() → exec.run() → checkpoint.create() → fork().

Quick Example

import { Sandbox } from '@iris/sdk'

// IRIS_API_KEY is read from the environment automatically
const sandbox = await Sandbox.create()

// Run commands
const result = await sandbox.exec.run('echo "Hello from Iris!"')
console.log(result.stdout) // "Hello from Iris!\n"

// Checkpoint current state
const cp = await sandbox.checkpoint.create({ name: 'baseline' })

// Fork from here — original sandbox keeps running
const branch = await sandbox.fork()
await branch.exec.run('rm -rf /tmp/data')  // branch is expendable

await branch.kill()
// Original sandbox is untouched

Use Cases

Use Case	Description
AI Agents	Fork before tool calls, discard the branch on failure
Testing	Fork from a seeded state for each test, no shared state
Debugging	Checkpoint a bug, fork repeatedly while investigating
Experimentation	Fork from a decision point, run parallel approaches