Lifecycle
A Playhouse has a deliberately small lifecycle: create and delete. It persists in between, idempotent re-runs resume setup, and deletion is guarded.
A Playhouse has a deliberately small lifecycle. Unlike a Playroom, which you stop and start, a Playhouse is either created or deleted, and it stays running in between. Stopping and starting compute happens at the Playroom level, not the Playhouse level.
create
Provision the cluster and bootstrap it. This is idempotent: re-running create with the same name resumes setup (ensure node pools → wait for running → bootstrap) rather than failing. A re-run is how you repair or upgrade a Playhouse.
(persists)
The Playhouse keeps running. Playrooms are created and deleted inside it; the Playhouse itself stays up.
delete
Mark the cluster for deletion. This destroys the Playhouse and everything in it, so it is guarded (see below).
acloud playhouse create demo
│
▼
┌───────────┐
│ running │ ◄── re-run create resumes / reconverges
│ (persists)│ Playrooms come and go inside it
└───────────┘
│
▼
acloud playhouse delete playhouse-demo
(destroys the cluster and all Playrooms in it)Idempotent resume
Because every bootstrap step is applied server-side, a failed or interrupted create is recovered by simply running it again. An existing cluster with the same name that isn't a Playhouse (its slug doesn't start with playhouse-) is rejected rather than reused.
Deletion is guarded
Playrooms block deletion
delete refuses to run while any Playrooms still exist in the Playhouse (running or stopped), because deleting it destroys them and their data. Remove the Playrooms first, or pass --force to delete anyway. --force is also needed when the Playhouse is unreachable and the check can't run.
Deleting a Playhouse requires typing the full name. The last-used shortcut and cached defaults that Playroom commands accept are not allowed for delete.
After a Playhouse is deleted, its name stays reserved for a while (about 24h) before it can be reused. Recreating with the same name during that window fails with a clear message, so try again later or pick a different name.
SEE ALSO
- Setup: what create provisions and bootstraps
- playhouse create: create or resume a Playhouse
- playhouse delete: delete a Playhouse and its cluster