Limitations

sudo access

Typically, sudo access allows users to run programs with the privileges of another user (the superuser) by default. Currently, due to security reasons, CodeSandbox Repositories don't provide an option to run sudo commands. This is necessary to provide you with collaboration features on top of the ephemeral developer environment experience.

Workarounds

To work around this, there are two ways to install packages.

Docker

This is our recommended way to install packages. You can find more information about our Docker integration here.

NixOS

CodeSandbox natively supports the Nix (opens in a new tab) package manager. To install a package, you can define a file in the root of your project called csb.nix and configure which packages should be automatically installed from the nix package store (opens in a new tab).

See an example configuration below:

with import <nixpkgs> {};
 
stdenv.mkDerivation {
    name = "csb";
    buildInputs = [
        postgres
        htop
    ];
    shellHook = ''
        export PATH="$PWD/node_modules/.bin/:$PATH"
    '';
}

This automatically installs Postgres and htop the next time you open a terminal. An example of a project running Nix can be found here (opens in a new tab).