# boxlite-ai/boxlite

The micro-VM for AI agents — light enough to embed on your laptop, elastic enough to power an agentic cloud.

Repository: https://github.com/boxlite-ai/boxlite
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/boxlite
Homepage: https://boxlite.ai/
Language: Rust
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: sandbox, security, serverless, virtualization, rust, agentic, ai-agent, embedded, self-hosted
Last push: 2026-08-26T18:42:36+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 80/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 91, longevity 19
- inputs: {"age_days": 269, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 63, "gap_med": 1.0, "n_releases_24m": 39}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 2278, forks 164 (observed 2026-08-28T04:06:33.644530+00:00)

## What it is
BoxLite is an embeddable micro-VM runtime written in Rust that runs any OCI image inside hardware-isolated virtual machines (KVM on Linux, Hypervisor.framework on macOS, WSL2 on Windows). It is designed as a secure compute substrate for AI agents, allowing untrusted or model-generated code to run in persistent, stateful sandboxes with no daemon and no root privileges.

## Use cases
- run LLM-generated code in a secure sandbox
- execute untrusted third-party code safely
- give AI agents an isolated environment to run code and browsers
- run multi-tenant isolated workloads in a backend service
- persist agent environments across sessions with installed packages and files
- run a coding agent in an isolated VM
- sandbox code execution in CI or code grading systems

## When to choose
- you need hardware-level isolation stronger than containers for untrusted code
- you want an embeddable, daemonless sandbox library with no root requirements
- you need persistent, stateful sandboxes that survive stop/start cycles
- you want to run any OCI/Docker image unchanged in a microVM
- you need controlled networking with egress allowlists and secret injection

## When to avoid
- you only need lightweight container-level isolation and shared-kernel namespaces are sufficient
- your host lacks hardware virtualization support (KVM, Hypervisor.framework, or WSL2)
- you need a fully managed sandbox service without running your own hypervisor infrastructure
- you need Windows or BSD guest environments, since boxes run a Linux kernel

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: active
- function: security, sdk, developer-tools, self-hosted
- domain: artificial-intelligence, security, developer-tools, cloud-computing
- platform: windows, rust, python, go, cli, self-hosted, cloud
- tags: microvm, sandboxing, untrusted-code-execution, oci-images, hardware-isolation, agent-runtime, daemonless, kvm, hypervisor-framework, code-execution, sandbox, virtualization, ai-agents, linux, macos, nodejs

## Member repositories
- boxlite-ai/boxlite (main) score 80

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:06:33.644530+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T02:41:24.700513+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/boxlite-ai/boxlite (fetched 2026-08-28T04:06:33.644530+00:00, sha 27e75df26f56)
  - homepage: https://boxlite.ai/ (fetched 2026-08-29T10:21:52.233698+00:00, sha 472f1953c325)
  - site_page: https://docs.boxlite.ai (fetched 2026-08-29T10:21:52.243009+00:00, sha 80a5b901ad55)
  - site_page: https://docs.boxlite.ai/cloud/quickstart (fetched 2026-08-29T10:21:52.244947+00:00, sha 3d8bb62e3210)
  - site_page: https://docs.boxlite.ai/cloud/billing (fetched 2026-08-29T10:21:52.246878+00:00, sha ce009e6c91ff)
  - site_page: https://docs.boxlite.ai/getting-started (fetched 2026-08-29T10:21:52.248852+00:00, sha 72df400d8634)
  - site_page: https://boxlite.ai/about (fetched 2026-08-29T10:21:52.250613+00:00, sha 20a2d04dd660)
  - registry_crates: https://crates.io/api/v1/crates/boxlite (fetched 2026-08-29T10:21:52.252272+00:00, sha 4d01211f32f5)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.