Sessions (bake session)

Overview

Manage ephemeral, disposable local workspaces to practice and verify deployments before touching public networks.

bake session provides a temporary sandbox with its own ephemeral wallet, local test validator, and isolated environment variables. When you are done testing, closing the session tears down the sandbox without modifying your permanent bake use cluster configuration.

Prerequisites

• Solana CLI / Anchor toolchain installed locally (or available via WSL on Windows)
• bakeacookie installed globally:
  bashCopy

  npm install -g bakeacookie

Typical session lifecycle

# 1. Open a new disposable sandbox
bake session open

# 2. Inspect active session details (RPC, wallet, balance)
bake session status

# 3. Build and deploy your Anchor program into the session
cd my-program
bake session deploy

# 4. Tear down the sandbox and clean up temporary keys
bake session close -y

How sessions work

1. Ephemeral keypairs & isolation

When you run bake session open, bake generates an ephemeral keypair stored under ~/.bake/sessions/<session-id>/. This wallet is funded locally (via best-effort local airdrop) and isolated from your personal mainnet keys.

2. Process-local environment overrides

Sessions set process-local environment variables (e.g. ANCHOR_PROVIDER_URL, session keypair path) for commands executed under the session. Your permanent cluster setting (e.g. bake use cookie) remains completely untouched after you close the session.

Note: bake session is not required for deploying directly to Cookie Chain mainnet. It is designed specifically for testing, script verification, and dry-run rehearsals.

3. Identical deploy pipeline

bake session deploy runs the exact same runDeployPipeline engine as bake deploy — compiling contracts with Anchor, hashing the ELF64 binary, and performing full pipeline checks — guaranteeing that your rehearsal matches production behavior.

4. Single active session rule

Only one active session may run at a time per machine. If you attempt to open a new session while one is active, bake prompts you to close the existing session or pass --force to overwrite it.

Commands and flags

bake session open

Starts a new session, creates ephemeral credentials, and boots a local test validator (by default).

bake session open [options]

bake session status

Prints active session metadata, including session ID, RPC URL, ephemeral wallet public key, and local balance.

bake session status

bake session deploy

Executes the standard bake deployment pipeline inside the active session against the local validator.

cd my-anchor-project
bake session deploy

bake session close

Terminates the session's background validator, removes ephemeral keypairs and temporary state, and restores the standard environment.

bake session close
bake session close -y    # Skip confirmation prompt

Windows & WSL notes

On Windows, bake session relays validator execution and compilation to WSL.

• Do not run duplicate test validators simultaneously in both Windows and WSL.
• If port 8899 is already bound by an orphaned process, pass --port 8900 or kill the stale validator process before opening.

Expected outcome

• You can build, deploy, and verify Anchor programs locally in seconds without paying gas fees or risking live funds.
• Closing the session cleanly removes all temporary artifacts and returns your CLI to its configured cluster (cookie).

Related links

• Deploy Guide — understanding the production deploy pipeline
• Fork Guide — cloning on-chain programs into local test environments
• Command Reference: session — full session CLI options
• Troubleshooting — resolving validator port conflicts