Volumes overview

Attach Blaxel volumes to sandboxes and other resources for persistent storage that survives recreation, enabling stateful environments.

Blaxel Volumes provide persistent storage that survives resource destruction and recreation, enabling stateful environments and data retention across lifecycle events.

While Blaxel automatically snapshots the full state of a sandbox at scale down and stores it in warm storage for ultra-fast boot times, volumes offer a more cost-effective solution to persist files for weeks to years. Use volume templates to start from a pre-populated filesystem.

Volumes use block storage and can only be accessed by attaching them to a running sandbox or agent. They cannot be mounted locally on your machine. Blaxel also does not support mounting external storage (such as S3 buckets) as volumes.

Create a volume

To create a standalone volume, you must provide a unique name and specify its size in megabytes (MB). You can also specify optional labels. This volume exists independently of any resource it may later be attached to.

Learn more about authentication on Blaxel

The Blaxel SDK requires two environment variables to authenticate:

Variable	Description
BL_WORKSPACE	Your Blaxel workspace name
BL_API_KEY	Your Blaxel API key

You can create an API key from the Blaxel console. Your workspace name is visible in the URL when you log in to the console (e.g. app.blaxel.ai/{workspace}).

Set them as environment variables or add them to a .env file at the root of your project:

export BL_WORKSPACE=my-workspace
export BL_API_KEY=my-api-key

When developing locally, you can also log in to your workspace with Blaxel CLI (as shown above). This allows you to run Blaxel SDK functions that will automatically connect to your workspace without additional setup. When you deploy on Blaxel, authentication is handled automatically — no environment variables needed.

TypeScript

import { VolumeInstance } from "@blaxel/core";

const volume = await VolumeInstance.create({
  name: "my-volume",
  size: 2048,          // in MB
  region: "us-pdx-1",
});

from blaxel.core import VolumeInstance

volume = await VolumeInstance.create({
  "name": "my-volume",
  "size": 2048,          # in MB
  "region": "us-pdx-1",
})

bl apply -f - <<EOF
kind: Volume
metadata:
  name: my-volume
spec:
  size: 2048
  region: us-pdx-1
EOF

You can create a volume from a template to automatically pre-populate it with files.

TypeScript

const volume = await VolumeInstance.createIfNotExists({
  name: "myvolume",
  template: "mytemplate:1",  // Use template-name:revision or template-name:latest
  region: "us-pdx-1",
});

volume = await VolumeInstance.create_if_not_exists({
  "name": "myvolume",
  "template": "mytemplate:1",  # Use template-name:revision or template-name:latest
  "region": "us-pdx-1",
})

bl apply -f - <<EOF
kind: Volume
metadata:
  name: myvolume
spec:
  region: us-pdx-1
  template: "mytemplate:1"
EOF

Labels are specified as key-value pairs during volume creation.

TypeScript

const volume = await VolumeInstance.create({
  name: "my-volume",
  size: 2048,
  region: "us-pdx-1",
  labels: { env: "test", project: "12345" },
});

volume = await VolumeInstance.create({
  "name": "my-volume",
  "size": 2048,
  "region": "us-pdx-1",
  "labels": {"env": "test", "project": "12345"},
})

bl apply -f - <<EOF
kind: Volume
metadata:
  name: my-volume
  labels:
    env: test
    project: 12345
spec:
  size: 2048
  region: us-pdx-1
EOF

Delete a volume

Delete a volume by calling:

• the class-level delete() method with the volume name as argument, or

  TypeScript

  import { VolumeInstance } from "@blaxel/core";
  
  await VolumeInstance.delete("my-volume");
  

  from blaxel.core import VolumeInstance
  
  await VolumeInstance.delete("my-volume")
  

• by calling the instance-level delete() method:

  TypeScript

  import { VolumeInstance } from "@blaxel/core";
  
  const volume = await VolumeInstance.get("my-volume");
  await volume.delete()
  

  from blaxel.core import VolumeInstance
  
  volume = await VolumeInstance.get("my-volume")
  await volume.delete()
  

Resize a volume

Currently, it is only possible to increase the volume size (not decrease it).

Resize a volume by calling:

• the class-level update() method with the volume name and new size as argument, or

  TypeScript

  import { VolumeInstance } from "@blaxel/core";
  
  const updatedVolume = await VolumeInstance.update("my-volume", { size: 1024 });
  

  from blaxel.core import VolumeInstance
  
  updated_volume = await VolumeInstance.update("my-volume", { "size": 1024 })
  

• by calling the instance-level update() method with the new size as argument:

  TypeScript

  import { VolumeInstance } from "@blaxel/core";
  
  const volume = await VolumeInstance.get("my-volume");
  const updatedVolume = await volume.update({ size: 1024 });
  

  from blaxel.core import VolumeInstance
  
  volume = await VolumeInstance.get("my-volume")
  updated_volume = await volume.update({ "size": 1024 })
  

List volumes

TypeScript

const volumes = await VolumeInstance.list()

volumes = await VolumeInstance.list()

bl get volumes

You can use labels for filtering volumes in the Blaxel CLI or Blaxel Console:

# Get volumes with specific label (e.g., env=test)
bl get volumes -o json | jq -r '.[] | select(.metadata.labels.env == "test") | .metadata.name'

Use volumes with sandboxes and agents

Use volumes with sandboxes

Attach persistent storage to a sandbox at creation time.

Use volumes with agents

Attach persistent storage to a deployed agent via blaxel.toml.