I Gave Codex a 24/7 Server. Now It Codes While I Sleep.

Key Takeaways

I'm willing to bet you've probably seen something like this. Someone walking around with their laptop screen half open and you know that if they're a programmer, they're waiting for their agent to finish running. I know that this has been me many times. Even the other day at the airport, I was walking around with my laptop screen open looking like a complete idiot because I needed my Claude Coder Codex agent to finish running. Now, this is a problem that doesn't need to exist because you can actually run agents in the cloud if you configure them correctly and that's what I'm going to show you how to do in this video. I'm going to show you how we can set up Codex so that it's running 24/7 in the cloud so we never need to have our laptop screen half open walking around looking like a complete idiot. So, effectively, what I'm going to show you in this video is how you can run long-running agentic coding tasks in the cloud self-hosted using your existing subscriptions. This means that you can be on the go and that you can actually trigger a task to run from your phone. You can reconnect to it from your laptop, but the important part is that if that screen closes, your task to keep running, which means if you're sleeping or if your Wi-Fi goes out or if you're in an area where you just can't open your laptop, you can still trigger these agentic tasks to run and you can actually run them on a schedule, which we'll look at a little bit later. Now, for this video, we're going to use Codex. The reason for this is that Codex, in my opinion, is currently the best agent out there. Specifically, we're going to be using Codex CLI. This is something that can run in a headless environment and that we can execute from our phone, which I'll show you later. Now, Codex is currently leading in many of the different benchmarks out there. It can actually run faster than Claude Code and, more importantly, is significantly cheaper to use, especially on a subscription basis in terms of the usage that you get. It's practically unlimited if you're not running it, you know, in 20 different sessions 24/7. So, I promise we'll get into the setup, but I just want to emphasize why this is worth doing. Now, if you're going to run a coding agent on your own computer, you're going to run, you know, like Claude Code or Codex CLI or just Codex or whatever, you do need your computer to be open and that's because it's using your local execution environment or your compute to actually run a terminal command or modify a file or whatever it is that's going on. Now, this is fine in many situations when you're actually going to be actively on the computer, you're working on something, you're working with it kind of turn by turn, and every prompt you give is taking, you know, a maximum of a few minutes. However, if you want to do a task that's going to take 8 hours or you want to run a task every day at a certain time or you just want something to run for a super long period of time, but you're not able to actually have your computer open or needs to be in your backpack or whatever, obviously this doesn't work. And even if you could run it on your laptop, if you lose internet, if you lose battery, if you close it, if for some reason it turns off or restarts or goes to sleep or whatever, you're going to lose all of that progress, which obviously is very inconvenient. So, the solution here is to have a VPS or virtual private server where you can delegate long-running tasks. It doesn't mean you're not going to run stuff locally on your own computer. When you want to do something and you need to close the lid of your laptop or you know that it's not going to be available for the next 8, 10, 24 hours, whatever, you delegate it to the VPS. So, the basic idea is in this video I'm going to show you how to spin up a VPS, how to install Codex CLI on it and authenticate with your existing subscription, and then how you can control it from your phone or from your laptop, however you want to do it, so you can delegate those long-running tasks and have everything handled securely, privately on that virtual private server. This way, anytime you need something that's going to take a few hours, you want to run something on a schedule, do it on the VPS and then the active work you do on your own computer so you separate things out. Now, there's three main reasons why this works. First, a virtual private server doesn't go to sleep, it's available 24/7 in a secure environment with a hardwired connection so the internet just doesn't go out. You keep all of the data because you're self-hosting everything and you can keep everything in a secure environment. And importantly, you also have data center speeds. So, if you're going to be in a low internet environment, which I know I am a lot when I'm traveling, you can just use the virtual private server and get significantly faster speeds for downloading something, uploading something, getting a data set, training a model, whatever it is that you need to do. So, anyways, that is kind of the quick brief here and why this is worth setting up. Now, let me show you exactly how to do it. Now, the first thing we're going to need here is a virtual private server or VPS. But, you can get any VPS that you want, but for this video, I'm going to be using Hostinger because they have some of the best virtual private servers on the market. They are the most reliable and they're a long-term partner of this channel, meaning I can give you guys an additional discount. So, I would recommend going with the KVM 2 plan if you want to follow along with me here, but you can see all of the options they have. I'll leave a link to this in the description. I'm going to go with KVM 2. And then from here, what I'm going to do is deploy and provision my virtual private server. Now, because I have a partnership with Hostinger, if you go here and apply the code Tech With Tim, you'll get an additional 10% off as long as you're using a 12-month or 24-month subscription plan here, which gives you a massive discount. So, regardless, pick your plan, pick the duration of what you want, apply the discount code. You can choose the region that you want to have this applied in. My case, Indonesia because that's where I'm located right now. And then you can choose OpenAI Codex where it's automatically going to deploy this and install some of the dependencies for you, which will save you a lot of time. Hostinger also has a lot of other one-click deployments if you want to have a look at them. But, of course, for this video, we need Codex, so we'll apply that and then go ahead and press on continue. Now, if you're following along with me here, it may ask you to generate a root password for the server. If it does that, you can just generate a random one and then copy it obviously, save it, and make sure you don't leak it to anyone else. I will delete this server afterwards. So, I'm going to go ahead and press on next. I'm going to add the malware scanner because it's free and obviously just good idea to have on the VPS. And then press finish and it's going to take a minute or two here to provision the VPS. Once it's done, I'll be right back. I'll show you how we can connect to it and then we can proceed to the next step. Okay, so my VPS is now deployed. And what I can do is go to the VPS dashboard here to view all of the different controls and you can see that I have Codex deployed. Now, at this point, I'm going to assume that you have some virtual private server. Whether you're using Hostinger or not doesn't really matter. What we're going to need to do though is find the IP address of our server so we can SSH into it and start configuring a few things before we connect it to our phone and before we start setting up scheduled tasks, all of that kind of stuff. So, what I'm going to do is just copy this right here, the SSH command under root access. Also, right make sure you have your root password from before. If you forgot it, you can change it right here. And what I'm going to do is open up a terminal. So, you can see I've got a terminal open on my computer here. Let me just clear this and make it a little bit larger so you guys can see it. And we're going to paste the command SSH root at and then the IP address of our server. Again, if you're using a different VPS provider, make sure you get the IP address, you get the username, which is typically root, and then you know the password uh for signing in. So, let's go ahead and press on enter. We're going to go yes and just say okay, we can connect to this host, and then we're going to paste in our password. When you paste the password, you won't see anything here, it will be invisible. So, just paste it and then press enter. Okay, so you can see that I'm now signed in to my virtual private server. You'll see that if you see root at and then some name here, in this case it's SRV, that's just what Hostinger has named So, now what we need to do is just verify that Codex is installed. If it's not, I'll show you how to install it in case you didn't use the one-click deploy from Hostinger. We're then going to need to sign in with our account so we can start using our existing subscription or we can use an API key if we want, but that's going to be quite expensive. Then after that, I'm going to show you a few quick setup steps just to make this work really well. Then we're going to connect it so we can trigger it from our phone and I'll show you overall how this works, automations, all that kind of fun stuff. Okay. So, first things first, you can attempt to run the Codex command. Now again, if you used the one-click install option from Hostinger, it should automatically be installed for you. But if it's not, what you're going to want to do is the following. I'll leave this link in the description. It's just the docs from Codex and you'll see that there is a setup command here. So, there's a curl, you can just copy this, paste this as the command and run it and that that install the Codex CLI for you. Once it's installed, you may need to just reconnect to the server again so that your path updates because sometimes the path variable needs a second to refresh. We're not going to talk about that too much in depth, but if you install it and the Codex command doesn't work, then just refresh the terminal. So, just close it and re-SSH back in and it should work. So, from here, we should be able to trigger the Codex command. From here, we're going to go to sign in with device code or if you have your own API key, you can use this, but it's probably going to be better to use your existing ChatGPT subscription. So, I'm going to go sign in with device code and what it's going to say is go to this link. Okay, so we're going to copy this and just paste it in our browser and then we're going to paste this code right here from the terminal. So, let's copy this, go back. Okay, we're use my email here and we're going to paste this device code and then it should allow us to be signed in. Okay, so let's paste this and press on continue. Okay, so from here, it says that we're signed in now and we can go ahead and press on enter. From here, we're just going to go yes, continue, that's fine and you'll see that we've now open up Codex and we're able to start triggering something. So, we can say, you know, hello world and it will start giving us some input. Now, I'm not going to give you a full tutorial on how Codex works here. There's a lot of different slash commands that you can use. I'd recommend triggering the fast mode here even though it's going to use more usage, it's going to run a lot faster and if we keep going, you can see there's a lot of other stuff that you can run and that you can do. Okay, so Codex is now working. We have it running on our computer. If we want to exit out of this, we can hit control C on our keyboard. That should quit out of Codex and we can type clear just to clear whatever's in the terminal so we can have kind of a fresh screen. Now, what I want to do next is I want to show you just how to connect to GitHub because it's going to be very useful to have Codex connected to GitHub so that it can create repositories for us, do pull requests, trigger automations, etc. So, if you don't already, I would suggest that you create a free GitHub account. You can do that just by going to github.com. You don't need to pay for anything and then what we're going to do is the following. So, first we're going to go to our little avatar here, and we're going to go to settings. Now, from settings, we're going to scroll all the way down to our developer settings, and we're going to create an API key that we can use in our virtual private server to connect to our GitHub account. You can actually even give Codex its own GitHub account if you want, but I like to connect it to mine and just restrict the access that it has. So, what I'm going to do is go to personal access tokens here and go to fine-grained tokens. From fine-grained tokens, we're going to go create new token, and what I'm going to do here is just name this What are we doing here? You know, Codex VPS, okay? For the expiration, I'm just going to go no expiration, so we don't need to change it. I'm going to go all repository, so it can access all of my repositories, and I'm going to start setting the permissions that I want Codex to have. Now, if I want this to have the ability to create and delete repositories, I need to trigger administration. And if I want it to be able to edit contents of the repository, so make it commit or view it, I need to add contents. Also, I want it to be able to make pull requests, I need to add pull requests. There's a lot of things here, but for most of you, you're probably just going to need these. Now, for all of these, I would suggest you go read and write. Again, be careful, but what this is going to do is allow it to create, read, delete whatever repositories. Contents, same thing. This will allow it to create contents, make branches, etc. And then for pull requests, this will allow it to pull related comments, assignees, etc. Now, this is one you might want to be careful with because if you put it to read and write, it can delete repos. So, if you just want to test it to start, make this read only, which I will do right now. But if you want it to be able to make new repos for you and stuff, then you would have to go to read and write. Okay. So, from here, we're going to generate token, but we're going to do that in 1 second after we install a tool called GH in our virtual private server. This is essentially a GitHub tool that Codex will be able to use to do GitHub related commands. Let me show you how it works. Okay, so from our terminal, we're going to run the command apt install gh-y, okay? So, exactly like I have on screen and go ahead and press on enter. It's then going to install GH, which is GitHub effectively, which will take a second. And if we want to test if this is working, we can run GH. Now, after that, we're going to type GH and then I believe the command is uh not log in, it might be like Okay, so sorry, it's GH off and then log in, okay? And then what we're going to do is authenticate with GitHub. So, to do this, we're going to press github.com https and then we're going to use our Git credentials, okay? And we're going to paste an authentication token. So, then what we're going to do is go back here. We're going to generate this token. Make sure you don't share it with anyone and we're just going to paste it inside of here, okay? So, we're going to paste our authentication token that we just generated from the previous step. Now, you'll see it's logged in. You can see I'm logged in as Tech With Tim. So, now that I'm logged in, my Codex should have the ability to actually do things related to GitHub. And if we just want to test that, we can type Codex like this and we can just tell it. We can say, "Hey, you have access to the GH command and you want to use the username Tech With Tim. Can you just tell me a few repos that you have access to just to verify that the GitHub command is working?" And by the way, if you're wondering what I'm using to dictate here, I'm using a really cool tool called WhisperFlow. It's free to use. I have a long-term partnership with them, so I'll leave a link to it in the description. You can see I am an absolute power user and it is the best voice dictation or AI voice dictation. It actually has some really cool insights now where you can see exactly where you're using it, the streaks. Very cool, very good and you can see that I can speak at 260 words per minute as opposed to my normal typing speed, which is a lot slower than that. So, anyways, I'm going to go ahead and press on enter here and it's just going to go and try to use this GH command and let's make sure that it works. Okay, so you can see that it's giving me a whole list of repos here that it has access to, private and public, which means this is working and GitHub is now installed, active and we can move on to the next step. Okay, so the next thing we're going to do is trigger this from our phone, which means we'll essentially just be able to control the virtual private server and use Codex CLI from our mobile device and I'm going to walk you through how to do that. Now, the first thing we need to do here is install a tool called tmux, okay, or t m u x. What this is going to allow us to do is persist an SSH session even when we're not connected to the virtual private server. The reason why we're going to need this tool, we need to run this command that I have right here, is because if we connect to the virtual private server and we do something, so we say, "Hey, Codex, go do this thing, run CLI." And then we close the terminal, by default whatever was happening is going to be kind of quit out of her, it's going to be, you know, stopped, right? So, what tmux will allow us to do is run what's called a persistent session. So, even if we disconnect and we're not currently on the virtual private server, whatever we're doing will keep running in the background, which is super important and kind of the whole point of this video. So, we're just going to install tmux like this, apt install tmux -y. I'm going to quickly show you two or three commands that you need to be aware of and then I'm going to show you how we can set this up from our phone, which is really easy. So, once you have tmux installed, you should be able to run tmux like this, okay? Now, when you just run tmux, let me just um exit out of this by typing exit, what it's going to do is bring you into one of those persistent shells. Now, if we want to view all of the shells that are currently active with tmux, we can type tmux ls. We can see nothing is running right now because I had started a shell, but then I exited out of it, which by default is going to close it. Now, what we can do instead though is we can run tmux new -s and then we can give this shell a name. So, in this case I'm going to call it Codex. Now, when we do this, it's going to bring us again into a new tmux shell here. We can run anything that we want, so we can run, for example, Codex like this and let's just say hello world. And now what I'm going to show you is that if I close this virtual private server session and then try to re um kind of enter into it, I can get back into the shell without having any of this information lost. So, let me show you what I mean. I'm just going to quit out of my terminal. Let's reopen the terminal and re SSH back in. Okay? Let me just get the password. Okay, and from here what I can do now is type tmux ls. You can see the codex is still running and then what I can do is type tmux attach. If I just type tmux attach by default it's going to attach to the most recent shell, which is going to be codex. Now, if I want to attach to a particular shell because you can have multiple running, then I can do -t, sorry, and then codex. And what this is going to do now is bring me back into that shell. Now, again, if you're not super familiar with virtual private servers, you may not know why this is important, but this again allows us to have this persistent shell so that it can be stored and running in the background no matter what. Okay, so for now we're going to leave this shell running on my computer and we're going to move over to our mobile device where I'm going to show you how we can now connect to the virtual private server so we can trigger tasks on the go from our phone. Okay, so from our phone here, what we're going to do is go to the App Store and we need to download what's called an SSH client. Now, you can use anything that you want, but the app that I'm going to recommend here is called Termius, okay? It says modern SSH client. It's free. You don't need to pay for anything, but you need some kind of SSH client. You can do this on Android. Maybe they have the same app. If not, you're just looking for any SSH client, okay? So, what we're going to do is just open up this application and effectively what we're going to do is just go and sign in to our virtual private server from our phone. So, what I can do here is press on the plus button. I can go new host and I can start putting in this information. Now, for the label, I'm just going to call this codex Okay, CLI. For the IP or host name, I'm going to use the same one that I was using on my computer. So, that's 187.77.121.81. If you're wondering how do you find this host name, you can see it up here on my computer. I'll hopefully have this on the screen as well. It's the same thing that we were SSHing into from our computer. And if you go back to Hostinger, you can actually see it right here or from wherever you deployed your virtual private server. If we keep going, what we'll be be to do is use credentials so we can set our username. This is going to be root, and then the password is going to be the same password that you used previously as the root password for the server. Okay, so I've got all of those details in. There's not really anything else that we need to do here. We can just go ahead and press on enter, and then wait a second here, and it should start connecting to this server for us. So, if I press on it now, it's going to say, "Hey, do you want to trust this device?" I'm going to go, "Yes, I do want to trust this." And then it's going to bring me right into my server. Now, from here, if we want to change what this looks like, you can see in this app, there's a little button, so I can change like do I want it to be light? Do I want it to be dark? I think it's going to be easier for you guys to read it in kind of this light mode here, this yellowy color theme. And we can make the text size larger as well. One second. Um let me move this here. Okay, so that's pretty much it. You can set, you know, how you want it to look, and then from here you can type anything just like you would if you were on your computer. So, what we want to do now is we want to attach to that tmux session that we were running here, so that we can start using codex. And if we don't have an existing session, we should just make a new one, so that again, if we disconnect and reconnect, we're not going to lose that task. So, what we can do is type tmux, and then same thing, ls if we want to view what we have running. We can see that we have codex, and it's currently attached. So, I can do tmux, okay, and then I'm going to go attach like that, -t, and then codex like so. And you'll see that I'm now inside of here. It's kind of glitching out on my computer because, um what do you call it? I'm connected on my phone. But you can see that if I type hello or something, it's appearing on my computer as well as on my phone. Now, I know it looks a little bit weird, and that's just cuz we're attached from two sessions at the same time, but you can see now that I can trigger a task. I can ask it to write code. I can get it to do something from my mobile device. And then again, importantly, if I like close the session here on my computer, and I go back to my phone, you can see it's still running, and it's still going to be able to execute the various tasks. And then again, if we quit out of this, so let's get out of our session, and let's go back in, you can see that it will bring us back here and then if I want to just completely close out of this, I can press on it, press close and then if I reconnect here, so give this a second to reconnect. Same thing, we can do tmux and then attach and then we'll be back in the Codex session where we can start asking it to do anything that we want. And I'm going to change the color theme here so it's a little bit easier to read because it looks like it's like messing up here. Okay, so this one looks good. And then we can start triggering various tasks. So just give you an example of something we can do here, I'm just going to paste in a URL. This is one of the GitHub repos I have access to and I'm just going to say, "Hey, can you review all PRs in this repo?" And I know I'm kind of spelling some of this wrong but that should be fine. Let's go ahead and press on enter and let's see if it can go and review those for us. Okay, so you can see that it's reviewing all of the PRs right now. It's giving me all of the responses and it's saying which one should be approved, shouldn't be approved, etc. And now we're good to go and the same thing, we can close it, reopen it, go on our laptop, you get the idea. Now where this is going to become super useful is actually when we start running automation. So I want to show you that now. I am going to go back to the computer but keep in mind everything that I do on the computer, you could do it from your phone as well. It's just easier for you guys to see on a bigger screen. Okay, so I'm back on the computer, you can see I've reattached to the tmux session where we are running from our phone and now we can continue working. Now like I mentioned, I want to talk about automations. Automations are just things that can run on a particular schedule. Now unlike Claude Code, Codex doesn't have any built-in kind of scheduling feature although I'm sure they're probably going to add that in the future but if we want to set that up to run on our VPS, it's very easy and we can create something called a cron job which is a huge advantage of having this virtual private server. Now effectively, all we have to do is just tell Codex to do this for us and say, "Hey, every day I want you to do XYZ. Maybe I want you to review all of the code in my codebase and tell me if there's any security vulnerabilities. Maybe I want you to review all of the PRs and automatically reject or approve. Maybe I want you to write a change log of anything that's occurred in this repo. Maybe I want you to update all of the readme files, whatever, okay? So, what I'm going to do is just the following. I'm going to say, I want to set up a simple automation that runs every single day using the CodeX CLI. I need you to create a cron job. This is the key term that you want to keep in mind, by the way, cron job, cuz that's what you want it to ask it to do, that runs CodeX CLI on the repo that I just sent you above and reviews all of the PRs and then creates a markdown file that's uploaded to the repository that includes the status of those PRs and if they should be approved or not. This is a silly automation, like it doesn't really make sense to run this, but I'm just giving you an example of something you could do. Where I'm saying, "Hey, set up an automation. I want you to use CodeX CLI. I want you to create this cron job and execute this." Now, the way that this is going to work is there's this command called CodeX exec. And if you run this, it's going to not bring you into a CodeX session, but it will just execute whatever you ask it to do. So, I can say CodeX exec and then like do this thing. And it will just execute it and do it. So, we can set up a cron job that will do that for us. And I'm just going to go yes and don't ask for these commands uh cuz it's asking us to approve this. So, effectively, what it's going to do is say, "Hey, on this schedule that's going to be set up on what's called a cron job, which can run on kind of an automated timing, run CodeX exec, which is going to trigger this thing to happen, right? Where CodeX CLI is going to go and run this task and then complete whatever it is that we asked it to do." So, you can see that it's currently creating this cron job, we're just putting under a cron tab. It asked me just to approve the command, which I did, and you can see now that the entry is installed and it's going to start running this process. So, it's going to tell it, "Okay, run this." And again, the advantage of the VPS is you're in an isolated environment, so it's not going to mess up your own computer. If it actually makes a mistake, you can always shut it down, it's not a huge deal. So, it's just running all of these cron um you know, terminal commands for us and it should set this up and then we will have that automation running every single day. Okay, so just doing a dry run now to make sure this is going to work. I'm not going to bore you guys and go through this whole process. I just wanted to show you that setting up these automations is a good way to really utilize this VPS and have it running in the background even when you're not manually triggering tasks to execute. And again, the reason why you want something like this is so that if you want something that's going to take a long time to run, you just delegate it to the VPS, and you don't rely on you having a computer open. Again, you guys can set up all these automations, you can have it trigger, you can set up, you know, MCP servers, and you can do really cool stuff using CodeXCLI, which is currently kind of the leading agent and harness for coding related tasks. So, that's it, guys. I'm going to wrap up the video here. If you enjoyed, make sure to leave a like, subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you in another video. >> [music]