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Use Hercules Dev Machines to build and test your app before your publish it.
Dev machine setup panel with start and stop controls

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How do dev machines work?

We create a temporary server, download your code to it, then set up a local development environment. We then show you a preview inside the Hercules App Builder.

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My dev machine is having issues. How do I fix it?

We recommend you restart the dev machine.
  1. Click the Dev Machine icon in the top right of the preview
  2. Click “Stop”
  3. Click “start”
If it’s still not working, please “Report an Issue”.
Dev machine setup panel with start and stop controls

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Additional FAQ

Your published app is safe. Published apps are hosted separately on more scalable, robust, and reliable machines. They rarely have issues and are completely separate from Dev machines.
Users on paid plans get dev machines with more RAM and CPU and have longer timeout limits. Larger machines are faster for large codebases and make it faster for multiple agents to run at the same time.
Dev machine issues often happen after dev machines timeout from inactivity. They most commonly happen:
  1. While starting up:
    1. Loading forever on a specific step (eg on cloning repository)
    2. Showing a gray browser error screen saying a hercules-dev.com URL does not exist
  2. After loading
    1. Crashing in the middle of an agent run (404/500)
“Container is not running” – Sometimes happens when restarting the dev machine. Stop the dev machine, then refresh your browser.White screen – Can happen on first load. Give it 30 seconds. If not, refresh the preview or refresh your whole page.If any of these are happening, please try restarting your dev machine. If still happening, please “Report an issue” so we can investigate.