Set up Claude Code's cloud once, keep it

A blank machine every time

A cloud session of Claude Code starts on a fresh virtual machine that has never seen your project. Before Claude can do anything useful it needs three answers: what to install, which sites it may reach, and which keys it may use. If those answers live only in your head, you give them again at the start of every session, and every session opens with ten minutes of setup.

What a saved environment holds

Every cloud session runs inside an environment, a saved configuration you edit at claude.ai/code. It has four settings:

• Network access. What the session can reach. The default level, Trusted, allows package registries and a list of common domains, and nothing else.
• Environment variables. Plain settings the session can read.
• Setup script. A script that runs before Claude starts. When it finishes in about five minutes, the result is cached, so the next session starts from the prepared state instead of installing everything again.
• Network secrets. Keys for services Claude calls. You add a key once and list the hosts it applies to. The key stays outside the session and is attached to matching requests after they leave it, so Claude can use the service without ever seeing the key.

The last one deserves a pause. A key typed into a chat or stored in an ordinary variable is something the model can read, print, or paste into a file by mistake. A network secret removes that possibility.

Three ways to use it

Finance. A repository with the scripts that build your month-end pack. The setup script installs the data libraries once, and every cloud session after that opens ready to run them.

Operations. A scheduled cloud task that pulls yesterday's orders from an internal system. The system's key goes in as a network secret for that one host, so the run works unattended and the key never appears in a log.

Marketing. A website repository where Claude only needs the package registry. Leave network access on Trusted and it can install what the site needs and reach nothing else.

How to start

Open claude.ai/code, edit your environment, and look at the four rows. You don't have to write the setup script yourself: ask Claude to read the project and propose one, then paste it in. Cloud sessions are available on Pro, Max, Ultra and Team plans, and the repository needs to be on GitHub.