cleanup

crabbox cleanup sweeps direct-provider machines and local provider state that Crabbox created but no longer tracks. It is a safety net for direct (non-brokered) mode only; brokered fleets manage expiry through the coordinator instead.

crabbox cleanup --dry-run
crabbox cleanup
crabbox cleanup --provider namespace-devbox --dry-run
crabbox cleanup --provider namespace-devbox
crabbox cleanup --provider hostinger --dry-run

crabbox machine cleanup is preserved as a compatibility alias and behaves identically.

#Behavior

Cleanup refuses to run when a coordinator is configured:

machine cleanup is disabled when a coordinator is configured; coordinator TTL alarms own brokered cleanup

Sweeping provider resources behind a coordinator can race live brokered leases, so brokered expiry is owned entirely by the coordinator's TTL alarm. See Lifecycle cleanup.

What cleanup does depends on the selected provider:

Direct cloud/VM providers (for example hetzner, aws, azure, gcp,

proxmox, xcp-ng, hostinger, parallels, cloudflare, local-container, multipass) enumerate the machines they own and decide, per machine, whether to delete it.

hostinger is stop-only: cleanup skips VPSs that are not positively

identified as Crabbox-owned and stops matching VPSs; it does not delete VPSs or cancel Hostinger subscriptions.

namespace-devbox removes only Crabbox-owned local Namespace SSH files;

it does not delete remote Devboxes.

namespace-instance destroys only Namespace Compute instances carrying

Crabbox ownership labels and removes claims for instances already gone.

vercel-sandbox sweeps only local vsbx_... claims in the configured

project/team/scope. It deletes idle-expired Crabbox-owned Vercel Sandboxes and keeps missing-or-inaccessible claims unless --vercel-sandbox-forget-missing is explicit.

cloudflare-dynamic-workers checks local Dynamic Workers claims against

the loader and removes only stale local claims whose loader metadata is missing or terminal. It does not enumerate or delete every Dynamic Worker in the Cloudflare account.

Providers that have nothing to sweep return an error rather than acting. For

example provider=ssh (static / bring-your-own hosts) reports:

``text machine cleanup is not supported for provider=ssh ``

#Deletion decisions for direct machines

Selection is label-driven. Cleanup reads the keep, state, expires_at, and ttl labels written when the machine was created. The decision is conservative:

skip machines labeled keep=true;
for running or provisioning machines, skip until well past expiry — delete

only once the expiry time plus a 12-hour stale window has elapsed;

for leased, ready, or active machines, delete once expired;
always delete machines in failed, released, or expired states;
for any other machine, delete only if expires_at/ttl parses and has passed;

skip if the expiry label is missing or still in the future.

Resources without these labels are skipped (reason=missing labels), so non-Crabbox machines are never touched.

#Namespace local cleanup

For provider=namespace-devbox, cleanup removes only Crabbox-owned Namespace SSH snippets and keys under ~/.namespace/ssh/:

~/.namespace/ssh/crabbox-*.devbox.namespace.ssh
~/.namespace/ssh/crabbox-*.devbox.namespace.key

It does not remove non-Crabbox Namespace entries, and it does not touch the Include ~/.namespace/ssh/*.ssh line in ~/.ssh/config, because that include may serve operator-owned Devboxes.

#Output

For direct machine providers, each candidate prints one decision line. --dry-run prints the same lines but makes no provider calls:

skip server id=12345 name=crabbox-blue-lobster reason=keep=true
delete server id=67890 name=crabbox-amber-crab
stop server id=11223 name=crabbox-green-heron

skip lines include a reason= (for example keep=true, state=running, missing expires_at, not expired). Without --dry-run, each delete line is followed by the actual provider delete call; a failed delete returns the provider error and stops the sweep. Stop-only providers such as Hostinger print stop instead and make the matching provider stop call.

Namespace local cleanup prints one line per file. --dry-run reports the intended action instead of removing anything:

namespace ssh cleanup would-delete /Users/alice/.namespace/ssh/crabbox-my-app.devbox.namespace.ssh
namespace ssh cleanup delete /Users/alice/.namespace/ssh/crabbox-my-app.devbox.namespace.key

When no matching files exist:

namespace ssh cleanup no crabbox files found

#Flags

--provider hetzner|aws|azure|gcp|proxmox|xcp-ng|hostinger|namespace-devbox|cloudflare|cloudflare-dynamic-workers|multipass|vercel-sandbox
                                                                       provider to sweep (default from config)
--dry-run                                                              print decisions without making provider calls

Provider and target flags (for example --target, --windows-mode, --static-host) are accepted for consistency with other commands but are not used to scope the sweep.

#When to run

after a CLI process crashed mid-warmup and left a server behind;
when migrating from direct mode to brokered mode (sweep first, then switch);
as a safety net after rotating provider credentials;
never as part of a brokered workflow — the coordinator owns that path.

For brokered fleets, audit crabbox admin leases --state active and end leases with crabbox admin release instead.