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Manage machines

A machine is a hosted Mac that Argent Cloud reserves for your session. See How it works. This guide reserves, shares and returns machines.

Log in and reserve a machine

sim-remote login authenticates you with your API key and reserves a machine. If all machines of your team are busy, the command waits for a free one. The command prints the name of the machine that you got.

Logged in. Acquired machine acme.runner-03.

You can also log in without a machine and reserve one later with sim-remote acquire.

Hold more than one machine

One user can hold several machines at the same time. sim-remote list-machines shows the machines that you hold and marks the current one. sim-remote attach points your session at another machine that you hold. A session started in a different client, for example the Argent agent, can share a machine in this way.

Keep a machine during a long run

The daemon releases the machine after 15 minutes without a sim-remote command. During a long test run that does not go through sim-remote, run sim-remote keepalive 30m to keep the machine for 30 minutes. A session holds a machine for at most 24 hours.

Give a machine back

sim-remote release returns the machine and keeps you logged in. sim-remote logout returns the machine and ends the session. Log out when you are done. A machine that you hold is a machine that nobody else on your team can use.

When a machine is returned, Argent Cloud erases every simulator on it and rebuilds the session volume from a clean image. See Security and data.

Example instructions

  • "Log in to Argent Cloud and reserve a machine."
  • "Show which cloud machines I hold."
  • "Release the cloud machine when the tests complete."

The sessions and limits reference lists the timeouts. The CLI reference lists all commands.