Console Access

Overview

Tapitalee gives you two ways to run ad-hoc commands against your app: background tasks and interactive console sessions. Both spin up an ephemeral container that has full access to the same add-ons, environment variables, and resources as your running app.

The container for tasks (both console and background) is ephemeral in nature — it does not attach to a running container. A fresh container is spun up for each task and destroyed when it completes. You can run a task without any processes running.

Background Tasks

tapit create task 'rails db:migrate'

A background task runs a command to completion without user interaction. It is the right choice for:

• Database migrations
• Data import / export scripts
• Batch processing jobs
• Any one-off operation that does not need live input

Tasks stream their output to logs and then terminate. You can add --wait to block until the task finishes and tail the output in your terminal.

Background tasks appear in:

tapit list tasks

See the Tasks reference for the full list of options.

Interactive Console Sessions

tapit run 'bash'
tapit run 'rails console'

A console session gives you a live interactive shell in a fresh, ephemeral container. It is the right choice for:

• Debugging and investigation
• Running framework consoles (rails console, python manage.py shell, iex -S mix, etc.)
• Manual data fixes where you want to inspect results as you go
• System inspection (environment, connectivity, files)

Running a shell on your app container requires curl and bash to be preinstalled in your app’s container image.

The container is discarded as soon as you exit the session.

For all the details — CLI options and examples, choosing an image, resource defaults, and session recording — see the Console Session reference.

Web UI

Both background tasks and console sessions are also accessible from the Tapitalee web UI. Navigate to your app and select Task Runs from the menu to launch a new task or console session, view the status and resource usage of current and past runs, and browse task logs.

Web UI console sessions also support transferring files to and from the container: use the Upload button to send a local file into the container, and the Download button to browse and pull files back out.

See the Console Session reference for details on the App console and Utility console options and file transfer.