Servers

Every session runs on a server. The desktop app starts one for you on your own machine and connects to it, which is why there is nothing to launch alongside the app — but you can add others, and Settings → Servers is where the list lives.

Sandboxes are servers too, and they appear in the same list. They have their own pages: Sandboxes, Mount folders and Isolation.

The local server

The app runs a CoDev Code server in the background and talks to it over localhost. It shares your config, your credentials and your session history with the codev CLI, so a session started in a terminal is in the app's Recents and vice versa.

You can point the app at a server you run yourself instead, by setting a default server in the picker — see Fix server connection issues if that leaves the app unable to start.

Adding a server

Settings → Servers → + offers:

• Add server — a CoDev Code server reachable over the network, including one over SSH. Give it a URL and whatever credentials it wants.
• Add WSL server — a server inside a WSL distribution on this machine. Useful on Windows, where a Linux filesystem and toolchain make CoDev's file operations behave the way they do everywhere else; see Windows.
• Add sandbox — an isolated environment. See Sandboxes.

Each server's menu carries Edit, Set as default and Delete. Delete is red in every case — it is the one irreversible entry in the menu and should not read like the rest.

Removing a WSL server

Removing a WSL server deletes nothing: the distribution, its files and its sessions stay on this computer, and it can be added back at any time. The app says so in a confirmation dialog before removing it.

It does clear the server's remembered projects and recently closed folders, so adding the distribution back starts with a clean list instead of inheriting its previous life.

A server that goes away

Closing a view no longer stops live updates for the others: the event subscription for a directory lives as long as anything is using it, rather than belonging to whichever tab touched it first.

When a server is removed while one of its sessions is open, its tabs are closed before its disk is deleted, and a tab whose server has gone away — removed, restarting or crashed — stops showing its unread and attention markers rather than failing. Navigating to something that no longer exists returns you to the home screen, so a stale link cannot wedge the app on startup.