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Ona Quickstart Get from zero to your first background agent in minutes with Ona Cloud. No infrastructure to set up.

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1. Create your account

Sign up at app.ona.com. You get free credits to start running agents right away, no setup required.
Want to run Ona in your own VPC? Get in touch to set up a self-hosted deployment on AWS or GCP.

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2. Optimize your environment

Ona needs a configured environment to run your tests and tools reliably. You can set this up manually, or let Ona do it — it will analyze your repository and generate a devcontainer.json and automations.yaml tailored to your codebase. Open in Ona → 
Create a high-quality, fully working "development environment as code" configuration for the current environment.

The setup must work for:
  - Ona development environments, which use DevContainer configurations.
  - All Git repositories mounted under the DevContainer workspace.

Required Process
  1. Read the documentation to fully understand:
    - Ona automations, secrets, environment variables, CLI, and prebuilds.
    - DevContainer fundamentals and how they integrate with Ona and VS Code.
  2. Analyze the source code and identify:
    - Documentation on dev setup or contribution guidelines.
    - Configuration files for containers, IDEs, build tools, environment variables, etc.
  3. Update all necessary files, including:
    - devcontainer.json
    - Ona automations (tasks and services)
  4. Run the Acceptance Tests and iterate until they pass.

Success Criteria
  - The DevContainer includes all tools needed to work with any file in any repo.
  - Ona automation services exist for every service required to run any app.
  - Ona automation tasks exist for all standard development workflows.
  - If an app exposes a TCP port, the DevContainer must forward it.
  - The DevContainer installs all VS Code extensions necessary to work effectively.

Allowed Sources
  - Ona documentation: https://ona.com/docs/llms.txt
  - DevContainer documentation: https://containers.dev/
  - DevContainers in VS Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers
  - DevContainer base images: https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/devcontainers
  - Any publicly available DevContainer features
See configure your environment for a full reference on manual configuration.

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3. Create your first project

Ona Projects A project connects a repository to Ona, giving you a single place to manage environments, automations, secrets, and team access for that codebase. Once a project exists, anyone on your team can spin up a fully configured environment in seconds. No local setup, no “works on my machine” problems. Projects also unlock automations: scheduled tasks, webhook-triggered workflows, and background agents that run against your code continuously. And with tools like prebuilds and warm pools, you can optimize startup times so environments are ready before anyone needs them. Go to Projects → New Project, select your Git provider, and pick a repository. See Create your first project for a detailed walkthrough.

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4. Start your first environment

Ona Environment From your project, click New Environment and Ona will spin up an environment with your code ready to go. From here you can open VS Code in your browser, talk to Ona, or jump into your favorite IDE.

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5. Talk to Ona

Once your environment is running, you have a session with Ona Agent. Describe what you want to build, fix, or explore and Ona will get to work. Click any of the examples below to open them directly in Ona:
Explore a codebase
”Explain the architecture of this codebase”
Open in Ona →
Fix failing tests
”Fix the failing tests in the auth module”
Open in Ona →
Add a feature
”Add a new API endpoint for user preferences, following the patterns in the existing code”
Open in Ona →
Review pull requests
”Review the open pull requests and leave detailed code review comments”
Open in Ona →
Connect your project management tools like Linear or Jira and you can ask Ona to pick up tickets directly:
Pick up a Linear ticket
”Pick up the next ticket assigned to me in Linear and start working on it”
Open in Ona →
Implement a Jira ticket
”Look at PROJ-142 in Jira and implement what’s described”
Open in Ona →

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6. Run agents in the background

Ona Automations Ready to scale up? Start multiple tasks from the home page using Cmd+Enter (Ctrl+Enter on Windows/Linux) to keep agents working in parallel while you review results. For recurring workflows, set up automations to run agents on triggers like new issues or pull requests. Get started with one of our templates:
10x engineer
Daily, picks your top Linear issue, implements it, runs tests, and opens a draft PR.
Use template →
Scan recent commits for bugs
Scans recent commits for likely bugs and proposes minimal fixes in a draft PR.
Use template →
Sentry error triage and fix
Finds the top unresolved Sentry error, traces it to source, applies a fix, and opens a PR.
Use template →
Draft weekly release notes
Drafts release notes from the week’s merged PRs, grouped by category with summaries.
Use template →
CVE mitigation and dependency updates
Scans for CVEs or outdated dependencies, updates them, runs tests, and opens a PR with the fix.
Use template →
Daily standup generator
Pulls Linear sprint data and git activity to post a formatted daily standup update.
Use template →

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Tips

For more, see the best practices guide.