Help for renters

Using km from a terminal

Rent, open and stop from your terminal.

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km is our command for people who live in a terminal. It rents a card, opens its app on your own computer, and stops it. The rules and billing are the same as on the website. We'll publish the download when renting opens.

A rental, start to finish

Every command

• km login shows a link and a short code. Open the link in a browser where you're signed in, check the code matches, and click Allow. Each km sign-in ends after 90 days without use, and your account page can sign it out.
• km rent --template notebook --size 24GB rents the cheapest available card with that much memory and starts it, showing each step. Templates: notebook (Jupyter), comfyui, chat (Open WebUI) or finetune (Jupyter with Unsloth and vLLM). Card memory: 16GB, 24GB or 32GB (32 GB and up; without it, a notebook on a 24 GB card). --card "RTX 4090" picks a card by name, --for 3h stops it by itself after 3 hours of use (the most it can cost is shown first), and --wait 2h keeps trying every 15 seconds until a card is available.
• km open opens the rental's app on your computer and prints its address, usually http://localhost:8888 (another port if that one is taken). Leave it running while you use the app; press Ctrl-C to close it. The rental keeps running.
• km shell opens a command line in the rental, in your terminal, as the rental's own user in /workspace. It works for every template, the image maker and the chat included. Type exit to leave; the rental keeps running.
• km ssh connects to the rental over SSH, through km's own connection (no keys to set up, no port to open). Add options for ssh after --, for example km ssh -- -L 8000:localhost:8000 to reach a port in the rental from your computer. After the first km ssh, the rental has a name on this computer, km- and the first 8 characters of its ID, which VS Code (Remote-SSH), ssh, scp and rsync use directly.
• km exec -- nvidia-smi runs one command in the rental and prints what it prints. km ends with the command's own exit code, and anything you pipe into km goes to the command.
• km push ./data copies a file or folder from your computer into the rental's /workspace. Name a place to put it elsewhere, for example km push model.safetensors models/loras/ (a path ending in / means "into this folder").
• km pull outputs copies a file or folder from the rental to the folder you're in (or to a place you name). Paths start at /workspace. Only files and folders are copied, never links. Run either one again and only new or changed files move.
• km status shows your current rental and your recent ones.
• km stop stops the rental. Its files on the machine are deleted; its last save, when saves are on, is kept for a day to start again with. Save what you need first. km stop --job and a job's ID stops a job, or takes it out of the queue.
• km run --size 24GB -- python train.py runs a command on a card and stops the card when the command ends, printing the output as it comes. Add --wait 6h to queue it if no card is available. Files are deleted when the job ends, so have the command upload what you want to keep.
• km jobs lists your recent jobs; km jobs and a job's ID shows one, with its exit code and the end of its output.
• km sizes shows each size's available cards right now, the cheapest price, and jobs waiting.
• km cards shows each card model on offer by name, how many are available and the cheapest price. To ask for one instead of a size, add --card "RTX 4090" to km rent or km run.
• km run --image and your own Docker image, pinned by digest (ghcr.io/you/trainer@sha256:…), runs the command in it instead of a template. It gets a whole data-center machine to itself, and unlocks once your account is 30 days old or has spent $50.
• km load and a link to a file has the machine download it straight into the rental, and shows how it's going. For ComfyUI, the folder comes from the link when it can; otherwise add --to vae (or loras, checkpoints...). Elsewhere it goes in /workspace/downloads, or the folder you name. Add --detach to return at once.
• km token "nightly fine-tune" makes a sign-in for a script or server, approved in your browser like km login and printed once. Give it to the script as KM_TOKEN; your account page lists it by name and can sign it out.
• km logs shows what the rental's app printed last (its last 200 lines), read from its machine within about a minute: handy when an app won't start.
• km report "the app won't open" is the "It's broken" button: it stops the rental and refunds it automatically, within limits. What's refunded
• km logout signs this computer out.

open, shell, exec, push, pull, load, stop and report act on the rental you last started with km rent on this computer. Add --rental and a rental's ID (from km status) to pick another, such as one you started in the browser.

How the connection works

With km open, your computer connects straight to the host's machine, encrypted. If a direct connection isn't possible, it goes through a relay. Because it's direct, your km learns the host's internet address for that rental, and the host's machine may see yours. (In the browser, you connect through our server instead.)

Files

km push and km pull copy files and folders over the same direct connection, so big files don't go through the browser. For a file on the internet, km load has the machine download it. You can also upload and download through the app that km open shows, the same way as in the browser. Getting files in · Saving your work

Using km open counts as using the rental, so it won't be stopped as unused while data flows. km keeps its settings in your home folder (~/.config/km), readable only by you.

Updated October 8, 2026. Questions? Email support@kernelmachine.com.