Stop, pause and delete
Three different things happen to a lab depending on which button you press, and they are not interchangeable. This table is the whole page — the rest is detail.
| Stop | Pause | Terminate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The machine | Shut down and removed | Frozen, memory kept | Destroyed |
| Your home directory | Kept | Kept | Moved to trash |
| Everything else in the lab | Reset on next deploy | Kept exactly as it was | Gone |
| Your private tunnel address | Released | Kept | Released |
| Attached domains | Kept on the record | Kept | Released |
| Restart with | Deploy | Resume — instant | Restore from trash, within 30 days |
Pause is the gentle one. It freezes the lab where it stands — running processes, memory, your tunnel address — and resumes instantly. Stop tears the machine down; only your home directory comes back.
Stop
Shuts the lab down and removes the container. Your home directory is untouched, so your files are waiting when you deploy again — but anything you installed outside your home directory is gone, and the lab's tunnel address is released.
Use it when you are done for a while and want to free your running-lab slot.
Pause and resume
Freezes the lab in place. It uses no CPU, keeps its memory, keeps its address, and comes back instantly with every process exactly where it was.
Use it when you are stepping away mid-task.
If the lab is part of a scale group and has no health check configured, a paused replica stays in the load-balancer pool and traffic keeps being sent to it. Configure a health check, or stop the replica instead.
Terminate
Destroys the lab and frees its slot. Only available for extra copies — your main lab of a given type is a permanent record and is stopped rather than destroyed.
Terminate offers two options:
| Option | What happens |
|---|---|
| Move to trash | Configuration and data are recoverable for 30 days |
| Delete permanently | Immediate and irreversible |
The trash panel shows each item with the number of days before it is purged automatically. Restoring brings it back as a copy with its configuration and data intact.
Redeploy
Redeploying rebuilds the machine from its image and reapplies your saved settings — passwords, SSH keys, startup script, routing.
It is the way to apply most configuration changes, it costs nothing, and it resets the expiry clock.
Your home directory survives. Everything else is rebuilt.
When labs shut down on their own
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| The lab has a session timer | Challenge labs run for a set time, then stop |
| You have not signed in for a while | Running labs are stopped — your home directory is kept |
| Sustained heavy CPU use | You are warned, then the lab is stopped |
A lab set to always-on is brought back automatically after an unexpected stop.
If a lab stops and you are not sure why, its Activity tab lists recent lifecycle events and who or what caused each one.
Do it with an AI assistant
You can also do this by asking an AI assistant connected to your account — see Connect an AI assistant to set one up.
| Ask | What the assistant does |
|---|---|
| “Stop all my running labs” | Lists them with list_labs, then stop_lab for each one |
| “Pause my lab, I'll be back after lunch” | pause_lab — and resume_lab when you ask it to continue |
| “Redeploy my ubuntu lab” | deploy_lab, then waits with wait_for_deploy |
| “Delete my testing copy” | Finds the copy's id with list_labs, then terminate_lab |
A redeploy rebuilds the lab from its image: your home directory survives, anything installed elsewhere does not. Terminate removes a copy for good. Check the assistant names the right lab before it goes ahead.