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ProjectStart

Introduction

ProjectStart gives you a complete, isolated development environment in one creation flow, and lets you change, suspend, restore and remove it safely. It changes an existing resource only after checking that the resource belongs to this installation and project.

This guide is for administrators who use the admin site. Installing and running ProjectStart on a host is in the operator guide.

What a project is

Section titled “What a project is”

A project has a place where its agents work, a workspace there, and optionally a private Git repository on an approved Git host. It runs in one of two places:

  • A container (the default): an Ubuntu 26.04 container with development tools, the workspace at ~/workspace, and an HTTPS address that leads to port 3000 in that container. Your project’s application must listen on port 3000; ProjectStart doesn’t build or run it.
  • A remote host: a server you already run, reached over SSH or through a small program installed there (see Remote hosts). ProjectStart makes no container or address for it.

With a repository, the workspace is a clone of it that can push. Without one, the workspace is a local Git repository with no remote, and nothing is pushed anywhere.

Creating a project installs no coding agent. You add a project’s agents afterwards, each Claude Code or Codex, using the logins in Settings; an agent’s engine and login are set up in the project the first time that agent starts. Coding agents work from the browser in either kind of project.

Words used in this guide

Section titled “Words used in this guide”
  • Owner: the person who owns the installation.
  • User: anyone signed in to ProjectStart.
  • Administrator: a user with the administrator role. Today every signed-in user is an administrator (see Getting started).
  • Host: the machine that runs ProjectStart.
  • Project container: a project’s container on the host.
  • Project agent: a coding agent working in a project.
  • Chat rules: ProjectStart’s own rules for chat agents, installed for every agent, Claude and Codex alike. Nothing in Settings, a project or an agent can remove them.
  • Agent rules: your own rules that a project’s agents get besides the chat rules: the rule sets from Settings chosen for the project, and the project’s own rules (see Agents).