alt Hacker NewsExe.dev
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I just tried this, genuinely groundbreaking! So quick to spin a VM and get going
So I tried this the other day after Filippo Valsorda, another Go person, posted about it. My reaction was 'whoa, this really makes it easier to start a quick project', and it took a minute to figure out why I felt that way when, I mean, I have a laptop and could spin up cloud stuff--arguably I already had what I needed.
I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) isolated and disposable environments and 3) can be persistent and out there on the Internet.
Often to get element 3, persistent and public, I had to jump through hoops in a cloud console and/or mess with my 'main' resources (install things or do other sysadmin work on a laptop or server, etc.), resources I use for other stuff and would prefer not to clutter up with every experiment I attempt.
Here I can make a thing and if I'm done, I'm done, nothing else impacted, or if it's useful it can stick around and become shared or public. Some other environments also have 'quick to start, isolated, and disposable' down, but are ephemeral only, limited, or don't have great publishing or sharing, and this avoids that trough too. And VMs go well with building general-purpose software you could fling onto any machine, not tied to a proprietary thing.
This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd sign up.
Also, though I realize in a sense it'd be competition to a business I just said I like: some parts of the design could work elsewhere too. You could have an open-source "click here to start a thing! and click here to archive it." layer above a VM, machine, or whatever sort of cloud account; could be a lot of fun. (I imagine someone will think "have you looked at X?" here, and yes, chime in, interested in all sorts of potential values of X.)
This is cool. I am currently using GitHub codespaces and I would love a version of it with nothing but a web based terminal. I don't need all the other windows they put around it. This might be it.
Trying my way around it now. Not sure what is going on:
me: apt install apache
the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "apt"
me: bash
the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "bash"
I build a website using this interesting product, for anyone who want to checkout what it could be built
also it's a bad ui meme
Very impressive demo. From VM curation to vibe coding something running on port 8000 in Shelley just worked in minutes. I imagine quite a few technically impressive things happening under the hood, would be interested in reading more about those.
Small nit: I think you should make it more clear in the docs (if not in the landing page) that one can just use any key with the ssh command the very first time and it automatically gets registered. Also on the web UI one should have the ability to add the ssh keys. I logged into the web UI first, and was a bit confused.
I think the pricing is alright for the resource and remote development features, though might be a bit much if someone doesn't need higher level of resources for deploying something that's mostly already developed.
Anyway, this reminds me of a product called Okteto that had similar UX. They were focused on leveraging k8s for declarative deployment. But for some reason they suspended their managed cloud/SaaS offering for individual/non-enterprise clients, I wonder if it was because they couldn't make the pricing work. Hope that doesn't happen here.
The individual plan says:
— $20/month
— 25 VMs
— 2 CPUs
— 8GB RAM
— 25GB disk
— 100GB bandwidth
Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM.
If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and bandwidth), and I'm not sure what the exe.dev value proposition is. (I'm also not sure why one would want to split 25 VMs across so few shared CPUs/such little memory.)
I wish they'd auto auth you with Github based on your pubkey, in a similar spirit to `ssh whoami.filippo.io`[1]. That would remove so much signup friction.
SSH is really the only protocol you can do shenanigans like that over, it's a shame not to use them.
[1] (seems overloaded right now) https://words.filippo.io/whoami-updated/
I signed up and started a VM. Didn’t really expect the default chat interface at boot. I’m currently on my iPad and would probably have bookmarked it for later, but now I’m playing with it. Cool idea :)
Edit: it comes out of the box with screenshot capabilities. The defaults on this are very well considered. Im impressed within the first 15 min. Edit2: this is very neat. I will be recommending it to my non-coder friends who don’t really have the local setup to use Claude but would like to try a Claude-like tool.
In which country are the VMs hosted? Do you have a warrant canary? Where's the AUP and how much peeking into customer VMs and storage do you do to enforce it?
i got to try exe a while back and i have to say, the "Login with exe" [1] is probably the most magic thing i've seen since tailscale :)
How do you proxy the SSH connections? I thought you could not do hostname-based proxying with the SSH protocol
This is freaking fantastic. However, as a community college instructor I would like to have this self-hosted on a computer in campus. Excluding the CLI niceties, etc., it shouldn't be to hard to get a similar setup with Docker et al, right? (not for production)
Dang, everything about this feels really well considered. Semi-throwaway, nearly bare-metal machines that I can put on the internet with basically 0 config? I'll take
Oh I’m going to need more info than this. It’s a service that provides persistent disk and VM’s but doesn’t tell you what those shared resource limits are, what the pricing is, or anything other than to ssh in…
I really enjoyed using this service. I signed up on my phone two nights ago, (using termux + ssh) and then used the builtin web agent to setup a small webapp. I was up and running with an HTTPS server in minutes, since all the HTTPS certs are automatically taken care of.
I'm not using it yet, but the way that it handles sharing looks incredibly sweet: an excellent way to take "home-cooked software and bare-foot developers" "perfect software: an audience of one" from one to a few / many people. Just sharing links that people can easily sign into, without having to build a whole auth system seems ridiculously easy here, and that is super cool. You don't have to think about it, you can just build your app: this fills a huge gap that makes making connected online software so much easier. https://outofdesk.netlify.app/blog/perfect-software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334206 https://exe.dev/docs/sharing
I used the included Shelley agent, which has a perfectly adequate simple web ui, to do all development. It was able to debug a bunch of pretty gnarly problems, using screenshots & scrolling down to get check it's work.
My output is a super simple site, very close to vibe coded, in ~90 minutes, but I quite enjoyed setting up a little guestbook project here: https://nan-falcon.exe.xyz/
I'd be interested if I knew who was behind the company and could reasonably trust that I wasn't going to get my data stolen etc.
I built a similar infrastructure, a bit more human friendly, for spinning up AI agents' sessions for scientific work rather than web dev. Also with Share link for the sessions. (https://ai-archive.io)
Nice one. Love the coding agent web ui. I used https://temp-mail.org as I didn't want to use a real email.
Enjoy my creation https://love-storm.exe.xyz:8001
Super cool. I can't justify investing time in it at the planned pricing but I'll keep an eye on it if they can hack together a more competitive VPS option.
Seems like a great tool but login not working for me, am I doing something wrong?
``` ssh exe.dev Please complete registration by running: ssh exe.dev Connection to exe.dev closed. ```
I'm not a fan of making ssh the primary access mechanism for a service. Just make a simple Web panel for managing VMs, and actually explain on the service on the Web page.
Looking at the pricing plan, even the cheapest one is overkill. I don't need that much. 2GB memory with a 6VM limit would be plenty.
I really like the experience, after being a stuck I just tried to ssh from my termux on phone and it really worked! Absolutely awesome
just to be clear, this is total resources for all the vm right ?
like you give 2 cpu. 8gb memory for 20vms. Which I believe you wont be able to use 20 of them at the same time if they share 2 cpu only
Does anyone know e.g. a small systemd-nspawn oneliner to SSH in securely?
This is awesome. Would love to see a slimmer tier closer to a DO droplet or Hetzner instance that's ~$5-8 / month.
I'm trying to set it up but getting this error:
> ssh exe.dev
Please complete registration by running: ssh exe.dev Connection to exe.dev closed.
Anyone get a similar issue?
Might be a good place for yunohost/coolify style services, especially if you have multiple separate entities - though probably tricky to do inbound mail because of IP allocation?
I like it. Great cli design. its so cool!
really cool stuff!
The description of authentication mechanism is confusing me. it’s over ssh, but how is this integrated?
> Private by default, share with discord-style links exe.dev takes care of TLS and auth for you. By default only you can reach your HTTP services, and you have easy mechanims to share them with friends and colleagues.
Is anyone with access to a link able to get in?
Are they actually VMs, or are they containers? Some kind of special container like gvisor? Firecracker microvms?
Are there any fundamental differences between E2B and this?
> exe.dev is a subscription service that gives you virtual machines, with persistent disks
Other than a quick boot, what separates this from going on a VPS provider and spinning up servers?
If we're just throwing out ssh targets, there's also funky.nondeterministic.computer
I don't really see what's so different about this than any other dedicated server provider... I can sign up to any host right now and get an email with access to the server details... Like, what am I missing here?
This seems to be a honeypot for associating your SSH public key with other identifying details.
ssh exe.dev gives me login required. What am I doing wrong?
See also, for comparison: https://www.val.town/
Awesome project which I first thought might have something to do with microsft .exe format but not that big of a deal and I find this project really cool and I had thought about similar project like these so kudos that you built something like this!
I mean it and I wish the best of luck for the project
That being said, I tried to look at it for asap golang project deployments and I am the creator of https://spocklet-pomodo.hf.space/ a single main.go + single dep multiplayer pomodoro (please note that it was one shotted out of curiosity and also frustration as https://cuckoo.team would sometimes glitch for me)
That being said, I face the issue where I can't have a go.mod or run go mod tidy because I face this error
exedev@crimson-cobra:~$ go mod tidy go: finding module for package github.com/gorilla/websocket go: pomodo imports
github.com/gorilla/websocket: module github.com/gorilla/websocket: Get "https://proxy.golang.org/github.com/gorilla/websocket/@v/lis...": dial tcp: lookup proxy.golang.org on 1.1.1.1:53: read udp 10.42.0.45:33739->1.1.1.1:53: i/o timeout
Hope that the project fixes this and wishing best of luck to the project. I am a little busy right now with studies but your idea truly inspired me and perhaps I want to create a similar thing or collaborate on it with you too so I will join discord hopefully sooner than later.
I am looking further into it and seeing if I can fix that error as I would love to host some exe.dev's services and wishing the best of luck for the project and hope that it becomes sustainable enough.
Out of curiosity, if I may ask, what is the tech stack behind this which generates the vm's. Is it libvirt or firecracker perhaps?
For my own use cases, I recently rediscovered incus and even ran it on cachyos on my desktop to try it out and there were some hiccups partially because I was running it on non standard debian/ubuntu but I am overall very pleasant with incus but still, I am interested in what tech stack you used so please discuss!!
Also what cloud provider are you using. Pro tip but if you are looking for something cheap, either go with ovh or upcloud.
I really really love hetzner a lot too. (Hey hetzner_OL if you are reading this, love hetzner, have a nice day and hope your christmas was good:)
But still hetzner is a little admittedly more strict than ovh but maybe hetzner can respond to it as I know that their policy can ban accounts if someone abuses and considering that you provide compute (to even free) chances of abuse can rise but overall hetzner's the cheapest so I hope hetzner team might make an special exception/response to your post/my comment.
I am imagining a github private action which ssh's into this and then updates and runs a simple shell script which can be a reinstall state every time someone updates something in git to get git-ops style workflow. If someone implements it for exe.dev, just credit me :) (if you so wish) ` An amazing product overall. 7/10 due to that one hiccup which saddened me a bit (but which I have faith can be fixed) but its a 9-10/10 potential and that means a lot and a 7/10 at launch is pretty good
Please just tell me every decision/question I had in depth since I love details about projects like these ^^
Another minor suggestion I can have is having asciinema gif too to showcase what it does for some people. To me I only understood to run the command ssh exe.dev which then helped me learn but the only way I understood what exe.dev does beforehand was reading the comments on HN
An asciinema can go a long way in this journey, perhaps, let me know your thoughts.
And have a nice day! One thing I am wondering tho is if you are gonna open source the project, one project which feels similar to your project which is open source is this https://github.com/ekzhang/ssh-hypervisor that runs on top of firecracker
"you have sudo"
I've never heard root access described like this before and it instantly made me think this is run by script kiddies, trust = 0
Is that the OpenBSD logo they're using?!
$20 a mo seems overpriced.
That must be worst website ever made.
Zero information available on mobile.
I thought it is some kind of portfolio site that does not work on mobile.