How to Manage DigitalOcean Harness Runtime Sessionspublic
Last verified 9 Oct 2026
DigitalOcean Harness Runtime provides managed, hardware-isolated microVM sandboxes with built-in tools such as Chromium to run harnesses and execute arbitrary code. Rich lifecycle APIs preserve conversational history and working state across sessions, letting you pause, resume, and fork work to control costs and adapt to the nonlinear nature of agentic workflows. Scale complete agents such as Claude Code or use sandboxes independently for code execution, all through the same service. See What You Can Build for example use cases.
All sessions are displayed in the Sessions tab of Harness Runtime.
Use doctl harness-runtime commands or the Control Panel to manage the lifecycle of sessions.
Pause, Resume, and Remove a Session Using the CLI
Provide the session name or ID to the doctl command. To list sessions and their status, use doctl harness-runtime list. To show details for one session, use doctl harness-runtime show <name>.
Pausing a session suspends its compute while preserving the workspace, the agent’s state, and your conversation history. You can resume it and pick up exactly where you left off to save cost on work that spans hours or days.
doctl harness-runtime pause <name>
doctl harness-runtime show <name>
doctl harness-runtime resume <name>Sessions auto-pause after 15 minutes of inactivity. Sending a new message to a paused session resumes it.
If the session is bound to a reuse trigger, resuming it or sending it a message wakes it, and the trigger’s firings fail until you pause the session again. For details, see Choose a Session Mode.
Detach from a Session
Detach closes your local terminal connection and leaves the session running. From an attached prompt, press Ctrl+D.
Reattach to the session again with doctl harness-runtime launch <name>.
To remove a session when you no longer need it, run:
doctl harness-runtime remove <name>Removing a session tears down the sandbox and stops compute charges.
Use the Control Panel
You can view sessions and chat history in the Sessions tab of Harness Runtime in DigitalOcean Control Panel. To pause or resume a session, click … for the session and select Pause or Resume. Click Destroy Session to remove the session.