Your first lab

After the first start you have a lab with one project, default. This page creates a server in it with a command-line tool, so you see how your tools and your agent talk to the lab.

1. Copy the environment

In the menu bar, open the ownpaas menu and choose Copy environment (⌘E). Paste it into a terminal:

export HCLOUD_ENDPOINT=http://127.0.0.1:18580/v1
export HCLOUD_TOKEN=…   # the project's token, 64 hex characters

The lab answers the same API as Hetzner Cloud, so tools that speak it work unchanged: the hcloud CLI, Terraform with the hcloud provider, and the Go and Python SDKs.

2. Create a server

hcloud ssh-key create --name me --public-key-from-file ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
hcloud server create --name web-1 --type cax11 --image debian-13 --location lab1 --ssh-key me
hcloud server list

The server is a real VM on your Mac, reachable over SSH from your Mac (the server’s SSH button opens Terminal with the right key and address). In the app, the project’s Servers list shows it, and Activity shows the create_server action with the token that started it.

Other OS images (Debian 12, Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04, Fedora 44) are in the app’s image catalog. Installing one downloads it from the distribution’s own servers.

3. See what it would cost

The project’s Overview shows what the project would cost per month in the cloud, item by item. That figure is the start of Move to Cloud.

4. Start again

Choose Reset on the project (or ↺ in the menu bar). Every resource of the project is deleted and the project is empty again. Checkpoints & reset explains how to keep a state you want to come back to.

Next

• Connect your agent, so it can do the same.
• Kubernetes clusters, for apps that run on Kubernetes.