Vercel Sandbox now runs on Vercel Managed Images
By Steven Van ·
Today we are introducing Vercel Managed Images (VMI), a set of versioned, open-source base images you can use as-is or extend.
Vercel has introduced Vercel Managed Images (VMI), a set of versioned, open-source base images for Vercel Sandbox, replacing the now-deprecated Sandbox runtimes. The source for every image lives in the public vercel/sandbox repository. Starting with version 3 of the Sandbox SDK, new sandboxes default to vercel/sandbox/universal:latest, which ships Node.js, Python, common coding agents and standard utilities, so most users never need to build a custom image. The universal image also switches the default operating system from Amazon Linux to Ubuntu.
Every managed image gets a nightly release. Rolling tags such as latest and the major-version tags pick up operating system and dependency updates automatically, including security patches and new releases of Node.js, Python and the preinstalled coding agents. Dependencies are pinned to specific versions within each release, so a given image version stays consistent; pinning to an image digest (SHA) gives a fully immutable, reproducible environment that opts out of automatic updates.
The catalog includes several starting points:
- universal:latest: Ubuntu 26.04 with Node.js 24, Python 3.14 with uv, the opencode, claude-code, codex and pi coding agents, and utilities including git, vim, nano, tmux, ripgrep, jq and fzf.
- node:22, node:24 and node:26: Node.js versions on Ubuntu 26.04.
- python:3.14: Python on Ubuntu 26.04.
- ubuntu:latest: base Ubuntu 26.04 with no extra tooling.
- arch:latest: Arch Linux with no Node.js or Python preinstalled, useful for agents that install tools on the fly.
Sandboxes can reference an image from any repository in a project, a repository shared with the team, or any public repository, addressed by its full path (team-slug/project/repo:tag). The existing runtime property is deprecated but not removed, so existing code keeps working, and Amazon Linux runtimes remain available through it for teams that need AL2023. Managed images run as the default ubuntu or arch user with passwordless sudo, rather than the previous vercel-sandbox user.
