Nightly channel

Big features land on the nightly branch and get exercised on one machine — the maintainer's — before they reach a release. The nightly channel lets you run those builds so they get tested against real projects, real cloud accounts, and real habits first.

It is meant for people who don't mind the occasional rough edge and are willing to report what breaks. If you want a quiet tool, stay on stable.

Opt in

npm i -g @madarco/agentbox@nightly
agentbox install app            # macOS menu-bar app, if you use it

That's it. The version you now have carries a -nightly. suffix, and AgentBox reads that as "this user is on nightly" — the daily update check, agentbox self-update, and agentbox install app all follow the channel from here on, with nothing to configure.

If you'd rather switch an existing install without remembering the tag:

agentbox self-update --channel nightly

Opt out

agentbox self-update --channel stable

This moves you back to the newest release and records the choice, so a nightly build is never installed again. (It won't downgrade a running install below the current release — you land on whatever stable version is newest.)

What "nightly" actually means

The newest build, pre-release or not. Nightly does not mean "always a pre-release".

Nightly versions are named for the release they precede — 0.28.0-nightly.202607251430 comes before 0.28.0 — so when 0.28.0 ships it is genuinely newer than every nightly that led up to it, and you're offered it automatically. You then stay on that release until the next nightly (0.29.0-nightly.…) appears.

Two things follow, and both surprise people:

• You will sometimes be running a plain stable version. That is normal and you are still on the channel — the next nightly will reach you. Nothing needs re-doing.
• The update nudge can offer a version that looks smaller. 0.28.0 really is newer than 0.28.0-nightly.5. AgentBox labels this case ("the stable release") so it doesn't read as a downgrade.

You can check where you stand at any time:

agentbox --version                        # a -nightly. suffix means a nightly build
agentbox config get update.channel        # auto | stable | nightly

auto (the default) means "follow whatever build is installed". It becomes nightly the first time you update on the channel, which is what keeps you there across a stable release.

Things to know before you opt in

• Switching channels can trigger a cloud re-bake. If a nightly changes anything baked into a box base image, the next agentbox prepare for Hetzner, E2B, Vercel or DigitalOcean rebuilds it — a few minutes. Flipping back and forth repeatedly means paying that repeatedly.
• A nightly can change on-disk state. If a build alters how something in ~/.agentbox is stored, going back to stable afterwards may not read it the same way. Existing boxes are the thing to watch.
• Nightly builds are tested, not blessed. They pass the full CI suite (lint, typecheck, unit tests) and the box image is published for them, so day-to-day use is the same. What they have not had is time and other people's machines — which is exactly what you're providing.
• The menu-bar app may lag. It's published separately and only when it changes; your app checks both channels and installs whichever is newer, so a nightly CLI happily runs the stable app.

Reporting problems

Include the output of agentbox --version — the timestamp in a nightly version identifies the exact build. File an issue with what you ran and what happened. ~/.agentbox/logs/latest.log covers the most recent create/claude/codex run.

If a nightly leaves you stuck, agentbox self-update --channel stable gets you back to a release.