---
title: 'I Gave Codex a 24/7 Server. Now It Codes While I Sleep.'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=vQebObsd_Cw'
video_id: 'vQebObsd_Cw'
date: 2026-06-20
duration_sec: 0
---

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

> Source: [I Gave Codex a 24/7 Server. Now It Codes While I Sleep.](https://youtube.com/watch?v=vQebObsd_Cw)

## Summary



## Transcript

I'm willing to bet that 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 code or 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
that's running 24 over seven 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
agent decoding tasks in the cloud, self-hosted
using your existing subscriptions.
This means that you can be on the go, and then 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 is going 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 agenetic 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 the 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 cloud 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 seven.
So I promise we'll get into the set up.
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 cloud 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,
then 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, maximum a few minutes.
However, if you want to do a task
that's going to take eight 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 it 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 do this 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 VPN 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 eight, ten, 24 hours.
Whatever you delegated to the VP.
So the basic idea is, in this video,
I'm going to show you how to spin up a VPNs,
how to install codecs, 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.
You can delegate those long running tasks
and have everything
handled securely,
privately on that virtual private server.
This way, any time you need something
that's going to take a few hours,
you want to run something on a schedule,
do it all the VPNs and then the active work
you do on your own computers.
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 over seven in a secure environment
with a hard wired connection to 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 VPN.
But you can get any 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're 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 two plan
if you want to follow along with me.
Here 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 two.
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 to 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 any 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 a good idea
to have on the VPNs and then press finish.
And it's going to take a minute
or two here to provision the VPNs.
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 MVP's is now deployed,
and what I can do is go to the 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 hosting or not,
it 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.
And also
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 provider
make sure you get the IP address.
You get the username which is typically root.
And then you know the password for signing it.
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
are now signed into my virtual private server.
You'll see that if you see root add
and then some name here.
In this case it's SRB that just would host or name.
So now what we need to do is just verify
the codex is installed.
If it's not I'll show you how to install it.
In case you didn't use the one click
to play from Hostinger, we're then going to need
to sign in with our accounts
that 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 of that kind of fun stuff okay.
So first things first
you can attempt to run the Codex command.
Now again, if you use 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 will 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.
I'm not going to talk about that too much in depth,
but if you install it in 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 gonna 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 that should allow us to be signed in case
what to 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 opened 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 is 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.
I'm 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.
Okay.
For the exploration, I'm just going to go.
No exploration, so we don't need to change it.
I'm going to go all repositories
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 a 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 request.
So 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 a read delete
whatever repositories contents same thing.
This will allow it to create content,
make branches, etc.
and then for pull requests this will allow it to pull
related comments, assign it, 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 one second
after we install a tool called
g h 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 API to install g h dash y.
Okay. So exactly like I have on screen.
And go ahead and press on enter.
It's going to install g h which is GitHub effectively
which will take a second.
If we want to test if this is working we can run g h.
Now after that we're going to type g h.
And then I believe the command is not log in.
It might be like okay, so start
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 in 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 code like this.
And we can just tell it,
we can say, hey, you have access to the g
h 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 Whisper Flow.
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 is the best voice dictation
or AI voice dictation.
It actually has some really cool insights now
where you could 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 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 or tmux.
What this is going to allow us to do
is persist in 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 or 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 dash one.
I'm going to quickly show you 2 or 3 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 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 exit out of it,
which by default is going to close it.
Now what we can do instead though is we can run tmux
new dash s, and then we can give this shell a name.
So in this case I'm going to call it codecs.
Then when we do this is going to bring us again
into a new team shell.
Here we can run anything that we want
so we can run for example, codecs 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 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 codecs 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 codecs.
Now if I want to attach to a particular shell
because you can have multiple running
that I can do dash t sorry.
And then codecs.
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.
So 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 terminus okay 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 codecs
okay CLI
for the IP or hostname, 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 hostname?
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're ssh ING 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 able 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 foreign.
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
in to 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
yellow color theme.
And we can make the text size larger as well.
One second.
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 codecs.
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. Last,
if we want to view what we have running we can see
that we have codecs and it's currently attached.
So I can do tmux okay.
And then I'm going to go attach like that
dash t and then codecs like so.
And you'll see that I'm now inside of here.
It's kind of glitching out on my computer
because we 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 because 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 closed 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 codec session where
we can start asking you 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 paths in this repo?
And I know I'm kind of spelling some of this wrong,
but that should be fine.
And let's go ahead and press on, enter and let's
see if I can go and review this for us okay.
So you can see that
it's reviewing all of the PR right now.
It's giving me all of the responses and saying which
one should be approved, should it be approved, etc..
And now we're good to go.
And the same thing.
We could 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'm 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 team like 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 Cloud 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 X, y, z.
Maybe
I want you to review all of the code in my code base
and tell me if there's any security vulnerabilities.
Maybe I want you to review all of the PR
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 define
I'm going to say
I want to set up a simple automation
that runs every single day using the Codex clock.
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
because that's what you want it to ask it to do.
That runs correctly on the repo
that I just sent you above and reviews all of the PR
and then creates a markdown file that's uploaded
to the repository that includes the status of this PR
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.
I'm saying, hey, set up an automation to use Codex
cli way to create this cron job and execute this.
Now the way that this is going to work
is there's this command called Codex exac.
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
because it's asking us to approve this.
So effectively what it's going to do is say hey
on this schedule, it'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 which is putting under a crontab.
It asks 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 we're just going to tell it okay, run this.
And again the advantage of the VP 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 just running all of these cron the
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 service
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 that if you want
something that's going to take a long time to run,
you just delegated to the VPCs
and you don't rely on you having a computer open.
Again. You could set up all these automations.
You can have a trigger, you can set up, you know,
MCP servers, and you can do really cool stuff using
Codex CLI, 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 leave a like subscribe
to the channel and I'll see you in another video.