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This quickstart creates an Archil disk and runs a bash command against it from your terminal — no server, no mount, no install beyond npx. You don’t need an S3 bucket: by default Archil tiers the disk’s data to storage it manages for you. Attaching your own bucket as a data source is optional.
If you already have a server that you want to attach Archil to, see Mount on Linux (FUSE) (or macOS / in a container).
1

Get an API key

Sign in to console.archil.com, create an API key from the API keys page, and export it:
export ARCHIL_API_KEY=key-...
export ARCHIL_REGION=aws-us-east-1
Pick the region closest to where you’ll use the disk. This quickstart uses disk exec, which is only available in the AWS regions (aws-us-east-1, aws-us-west-2, aws-eu-west-1) — see Region Availability.
2

Create a disk

Create a disk. With no data source attached, Archil tiers its data to storage it manages for you — nothing to provision.
npx disk create my-disk
The output includes the disk’s ID (dsk-...) and a one-time disk token. The disk token is for mounting the disk later — you can ignore it for this quickstart, but save it if you plan to come back and mount.
If you already have an S3 or GCS bucket that you want to synchronize Archil data from, attach it as a data source — see how in S3 Object Storage.
3

Run a command like an agent

disk exec runs a bash command in a container with the file system already mounted, and returns stdout, stderr, and the exit code:
npx disk my-disk exec "ls -la"
Try something more interesting — summarize the bucket, or pipe a result into wc -l:
npx disk my-disk exec "du -sh ."
npx disk my-disk exec "find . -name '*.json' | wc -l"
No data is copied to your laptop. Only the result comes back. Billing is the wall-clock time the command runs (1ms increments, 100ms minimum). See Serverless Execution for the full model and the disk CLI reference for every command and flag.To search every file in the bucket for a pattern, use the purpose-built Search Files primitive (disk.grep) from the SDK instead of shelling out to grep — it fans the search across many containers in parallel.
4

Or do it from code

The same flow from TypeScript or Python:
import * as archil from "disk";

const { disk } = await archil.createDisk({
  name: "my-disk",
});

const { stdout } = await disk.exec("ls -la");
console.log(stdout);
See the TypeScript SDK reference or the Python SDK reference for the full API.

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Next steps

Mount to a Linux server

Run on Lambda or a worker

Use disk.exec from AWS Lambda or Cloudflare Workers without provisioning compute.

Build a bash tool for an agent

Wire disk.exec into an AI agent loop — about 30 lines.

Pricing

View Archil pricing and plan details.