Publish an app and let a visitor wake it

The shape: the agent builds something and serves it. You publish it, and get an address to hand out. When nobody is using it the machine behind it pauses, and costs nothing while it waits. The next person to open the address wakes it — no keep-alive, no cron job pinging it, nothing on your side at all.

1. Build something that serves a port

SESSION=$(curl -s -X POST $GOBARE_API/v1/sessions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GOBARE_TOKEN" -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"input":"In /workspace/app create server.js: a Node http server on port 3000 that responds with the text \"orders: 42\" followed by a newline and then \"process started at <ISO time the process started>\". Start it in the background, check it responds with curl, then call preview(3000). Reply with one sentence."}' \
  | jq -r .id)

Wait for the turn to complete — see the quickstart — and the session’s preview.port reads 3000.

2. Publish it

curl -s -X POST $GOBARE_API/v1/sessions/$SESSION/preview \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GOBARE_TOKEN" -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{}'

{"object":"preview","subdomain":"s-c80b3bad970247178bff",
 "url":"https://s-c80b3bad970247178bff.gobare.dev",
 "published_url":"https://s-c80b3bad970247178bff.gobare.dev","port":3000}

published_url is the address to hand out. It is a Gobare address, so it stays the same whatever happens to the machine behind it. See preview.

3. Leave it alone, then open it

Measured on production, on one session:

Time (UTC)	What happened
04:24:43	The server process starts
04:25:23	First visit: `200` in 2.2 s
~04:30	Nobody has visited for five minutes; `environment.state` reads `paused`
04:31:20	A visit, from a client that had never authenticated: `200` in 1.76 s. `process started at 04:24:43` — the same process, carried through the pause
04:32	Paused again, then woken by an SSH login instead: the files were all there, and the server answered — but `process started at 04:32:41`. A new process this time

The last two rows are the lesson. What is on disk comes back. What is only in memory may or may not. Write anything your app must not lose to a file or a database in the workspace, and let a restart be boring. The first visitor after a pause waits a moment — a second or two in this run — while the machine wakes. Everyone after them does not.

How long it lasts

A published app pauses but is never reclaimed. An unpublished workspace is reclaimed after two hours of idleness, with a snapshot taken first; a workspace over 300 MB is not snapshotted, and node_modules and .git are not part of that snapshot. See limits. Unpublish when you are done:

curl -s -X DELETE $GOBARE_API/v1/sessions/$SESSION/preview -H "Authorization: Bearer $GOBARE_TOKEN"

What a published address does not do yet

No cookies, in either direction. An app that signs people in with a cookie session will not keep them signed in behind a published address.
No WebSocket upgrades, and responses are delivered whole rather than streamed.

So today a published address suits pages, dashboards and tools that do not need a signed-in visitor. It is not yet a place to run a system your staff log into.

What was verified

The table above is one run against production on 2026-09-27: the build, the publish call and its reply, the pause observed through GET /v1/sessions/{id}, the unauthenticated wake and its timing, and the SSH wake with a restarted process. One run is a sample, not a promise — the timings are what happened, not a service level. Reclamation after two hours was not exercised in this run.

Take over the machine the agent is working on
How Gobare is different
preview — the two addresses, and who can open each

Start here

Running a session

Guides

Integrations

Client libraries

When things go wrong

API reference

About this API

Endpoints

Publish an app and let a visitor wake it

1. Build something that serves a port

2. Publish it

3. Leave it alone, then open it

How long it lasts

What a published address does not do yet

What was verified

Next

​1. Build something that serves a port

​2. Publish it

​3. Leave it alone, then open it

​How long it lasts

​What a published address does not do yet

​What was verified

​Next

1. Build something that serves a port

2. Publish it

3. Leave it alone, then open it

How long it lasts

What a published address does not do yet

What was verified

Next