Terminals

Every workspace has a terminal: a shell inside the same container the agents use, on the workspace's runner. Nothing runs on your computer or on Yard's servers.

Open a terminal

Choose Terminal in the footer of a workspace. A panel opens at the bottom of the page with the terminal of what you have open:

• in the workspace, the workspace's own container, in the workspace's files;
• on a project's page, that project's container, in the project's directory with its worktrees. A project gets its terminal once it has been set up.

To get to another project's terminal, open that project.

More than one terminal

Choose New terminal (the + next to the terminal's name) to open another shell in the same place. Each gets a tab, named after the place and numbered, such as workspace 2. Up to eight can be open in a workspace, and in each project.

The × on a tab closes that terminal and ends its shell. Terminals are shared: everyone who can edit the workspace sees the same ones, and closing one closes it for them too. The last terminal has no ×; its shell keeps running when you close the panel.

Drag the panel's top edge to make it taller or shorter, and close it with Close panel or the footer button again. The footer's Git button opens the same panel with the project worktrees instead.

Who can use it

People who can edit the workspace can open terminals; viewers cannot (see sharing and roles). The prompt names you and the workspace, for example alex@asset-library, so it is clear whose shell it is.

When the runner goes offline the panel says "Runner offline. The terminal comes back when it reconnects." A dropped connection is retried by itself; if the shell exits, choose Reconnect to start a new one.

Copy and paste

Keys	What they do
Ctrl+Shift+C	Copy the selection.
Ctrl+C or ⌘C	Copy the selection; with nothing selected, interrupt the running command.
Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Shift+V or ⌘V	Paste.

A right-click opens a menu with Copy, Paste, Select all and Clear. Where the browser does not let Yard read the clipboard, the paste keys fall back to the browser's own paste.

Tools in a project terminal

A project terminal has yard, yard-canvas, yard-shot and yard-display on its PATH. It can also read from GitHub as you: git fetch origin and gh pr view work for repositories you can read. The access is given to the terminal's process only and is never written to a file. See repositories and git.

From your own computer

The yard command-line tool can open the same shell from a local terminal with yard workspace shell. See installing the CLI and the CLI reference.

Direct runner domains

Normally a terminal's traffic passes through Yard's API on its way to the runner. An organization admin can give a runner an address of its own, so browsers connect to it directly:

1. On the runner machine, run yard runner direct set --listen <host:port> (with --cert and --key, or behind your own HTTPS proxy).
2. In Yard, open Runners, choose Settings on the runner, and enter its https address under Own address. Choose Save, then Check.

The settings say whether the address "answers as this runner". This works only for runners that are pinned to their machine. File downloads use the same address.

A terminal that connects directly shows "direct". When the address cannot be reached, the terminal falls back to the usual route through the API by itself, so nothing breaks for people outside your network.

See installing a runner for setting up runners.