[HN Gopher] Exe.dev
___________________________________________________________________
Exe.dev
https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev https://exe.dev/docs/how-exedev-
works https://exe.dev/docs/pricing
Author : achairapart
Score : 402 points
Date : 2025-12-26 23:42 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (exe.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (exe.dev)
| reactordev wrote:
| 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...
| crawshaw wrote:
| Hello, an exe.dev person here. There are some very early docs,
| exe.dev/docs (which are also accessible over ssh once you ssh
| in). There is a lot more to come, very early days, please bear
| with us. I was not expecting to see it here today.
| reactordev wrote:
| This kind of stuff is right up my wheelhouse so curious how.
|
| I love the idea of just ssh in and do your thing. I'll
| bookmark and come back when there's some more info. Things
| are going to move fast...
| twotwotwo wrote:
| I have played with it and it's so easy get started with that
| now I _want_ a quick-project idea as an excuse to use it!
|
| I'm sure you've thought of this, but: lots of people have
| some amount of 'free' (or really: zero incremental cost to
| users) access to some coding chat tool through a subscription
| or free allowance like Google's.
|
| If you wanted to let those programs access your custom tools
| (browser!) and docs about the environment, a low-fuss way
| might be to drop a skills/ dir of info and executables that
| call your tools into new installs' homedirs, and/or a default
| AGENTS.md with the basic info and links to more.
|
| And this seems like more fuss, but if you wanted to be able
| to expose to the Web whatever coding tool people 'bring',
| similar to how you expose your built-in chat, there's
| apparently an "agent control protocol" used as a sort of
| cross-vendor SDK by projects like
| https://willmcgugan.github.io/toad-released/ that try to put
| a nice interface on top of everything. Not saying this'd be
| easy at all, but you could imagine the choice between a few
| coding tools and auth info for them as profile-level settings
| pushed to new VMs. Or maybe no special settings, and bringing
| your own tools is just a special case of bringing your own
| image or setup script.
|
| But, as y'all note, it's a VM. You can install whatever and
| use it through the terminal (or VSCode remoting or something
| else). "It's a computer" is quite a good open standard to
| build on.
|
| Is the chat descended from Sketch?
| crawshaw wrote:
| Thanks! We are thinking a lot about how to prepopulate VMs.
| The first thing we are going to start with is a fast
| 'clone' command, so you can preconfigure a base VM then
| make as many as you like. Lots of other ideas floating
| around too.
|
| Re sketch: the code is not the same but the agent is deeply
| inspired by it. Eg the screenshot support, which just seems
| obvious to us. Philip has done the heavy lifting here, he
| hangs out in the discord if you want to chat about it.
| reactordev wrote:
| Prelaunch scripts. Snapshots. There's plenty of ways to
| prepopulate a vm. What's tricky is replicating that so
| it's available across the "nodes" they have.
|
| Man, this brings me back. Kudos to you guys! Just find a
| better solution than Ceph or minio.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| When you create a new exe.dev VM, you can tell Shelley what
| it's for. I've had fun results from, "surprise me".
|
| Also, telling Shelley to get inspiration from the VM name
| can be fun.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| > exe.dev is a subscription service that gives you virtual
| machines, with persistent disks
| satiric wrote:
| Thanks. I feel like I expect home pages to contain at least a
| modicum of information. And three seconds spent thinking about
| accessibility would have told them that light gray links on a
| white background are a terrible idea...
| crawshaw wrote:
| Apologies for the vagueness of the home page, we were not
| expecting to be here today. There is a little more info in
| our first blog post https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev and
| docs, but far needs to be written.
|
| (We have also built some interesting tech behind this that we
| are excited to write up, I have a doc two pages long of blog
| posts we want to write.)
| mcny wrote:
| The blog doesn't work on Firefox on Android for me
|
| https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev
|
| Secure Connection Failed The page you are
| trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of
| the received data could not be verified. Please
| contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
| crawshaw wrote:
| I just tried this out in Firefox on macOS and there are
| no issues, so this might have something to do with our
| LetsEncrypt wildcard cert and the CA roots installed on
| Android. Could you tell me what version of Android you
| are using?
| mcny wrote:
| Moto g stylus 2025 - Android 15 - metro by T-Mobile stock
| os
|
| Firefox nightly
|
| 148.01a
|
| I'll check for updates
|
| Edit: still broken
|
| 148.0a1 (Build #2016134322),
| 757b8230f44e4152aeb7b9031ff95219471ab993 GV:
| 148.0a1-20251226204324 AS: 148.20251224050247 OS: Android
| 15
|
| Edit: also same on OnePlus Nord N30
|
| 147.0b7 (Build #2016133535),
| 455e50920c4926534376b719df4cf1ed714bc61d GV:
| 147.0-20251222164020 AS: 147.0 OS: Android 14
| integralid wrote:
| Works fine to me too. Looks like you're the only person
| that reports that. Are you sure this is not something on
| your end?
|
| What TLS error do you get? Untrusted CA?
| esseph wrote:
| Works fine on Firefox/Android here
| mcny wrote:
| https://blog.exe.dev/
|
| I am not sure. I even tried Google Chrome
|
| This site can't provide a secure connection blog.exe.dev
| sent an invalid response. ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR
|
| https://i.imgur.com/HOwb7g3.jpeg
|
| also tried mozilla firefox on desktop
|
| Secure Connection Failed
|
| An error occurred during a connection to blog.exe.dev.
| SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum
| permissible length.
|
| Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
| The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because
| the authenticity of the received data could not be
| verified. Please contact the website owners to
| inform them of this problem.
|
| ssl labs says everything is fine
|
| https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blog.exe.d
| ev
| bstsb wrote:
| try another network. i often get SSL errors due to false
| positives in my internet provider's "virus protection"
| aleksandrm wrote:
| Thanks, I couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong. The
| front page is just... not helpful. Given the amount of pushbash
| how everyone feels about this, it should be removed from HN
| frontpage!
| ilaksh wrote:
| Are they actually VMs, or are they containers? Some kind of
| special container like gvisor? Firecracker microvms?
| crawshaw wrote:
| Hello, an exe.dev person here. They are VMs, on a crosvm-
| derived VMM. So I consider them "actually VMs", though we do
| not currently support custom kernels. You can do VM things in
| there, like create TUN devices, etc.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Thanks. So KVM I assume. Congratulations on your launch. Any
| plans for public IPs?
| crawshaw wrote:
| Thank you! Yes, KVM. And public IPs are very useful and we
| want to do them. We will have to charge and/or limit them,
| unlike VMs, unfortunately, because IPv4 is scarce. (I am
| busy trying to buy some right now.) You can follow along
| here: https://github.com/boldsoftware/exe.dev/issues/6
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Not super important to me (and you state explicitly it may
| change) but your docs are a little out of date here, I think.
| crosvm versus Cloud Hypervisor / Kata Containers, is, I
| think, different? exe.dev > doc how-exedev-
| works How exe.dev works (how-exedev-works) - press q to
| exit
| You're an engineer. We're engineers. Let's talk about what's
| going on under the hood.
| An "exe.dev" VM runs on a bare metal machine that exe.dev
| rents. We happen to use Kata Containers and Cloud Hypervisor,
| but that's a bit of an implementation detail (and may
| change!).
| With most providers, your VM starts with a "base image" and
| is given a block device. Exe.dev instead starts with a
| container image (by default, "exeuntu"), and hooks up an
| overlay filesystem to the VM. This makes creating a new VM
| take about two seconds. In exchange, we lose some
| flexibility: you don't get to choose which filesystem you're
| using, nor which kernel you're using.
| On the networking side, we don't give your VM its own public
| IP. Instead, we terminate HTTPS/TLS requests, and proxy them
| securely to your VM's web servers. For SSH, we handle ssh
| vmname.exe.xyz.
| crawshaw wrote:
| Yes our docs are out of date we are not using Kata, thanks.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| 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?
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| You ssh in with any key, and it asks you for an email to
| verify. You're then at a exe.dev console.
|
| There are a couple different link patterns:
| exe.dev > doc sharing Sharing (sharing) - press q to exit
| You can share your VM's HTTP port (see the http proxy
| documentation /proxy) with your friends. There are three
| mechanisms:
| 1. Make the HTTP proxy public with share set-public <vm>. To
| point the proxy
| at a different port inside the VM, run share port <vm> <port>
| first.
| Marking it public lets anyone access the server without logging
| in.
| 2. Add specific e-mail addresses using share add <vm> <email>.
| This will
| send the recipient an e-mail. They can then log into exe.dev
| with that e-mail,
| and access https://vmname.exe.xyz/.
| 3. Create a share link with share add-link <vm>. The generated
| link will allow anyone access to the page, after they register
| and login.
| Revoking the link (which can be done with the remove-link
| command)
| does not revoke their access, but you can remove users who are
| already
| part of the share using share remove <vm> <email>.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Thanks! love the idea, looking forward to playing with this.
| I understand now from comments that this was brought to this
| site sooner than intended, sorry if I asked in a rude way.
| achairapart wrote:
| I also don't understand this: Everyone with the right domain
| can ssh-in the vm?
|
| Edit: Answered below, thank you.
| llmslave2 wrote:
| 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.
| crawshaw wrote:
| Hello, I am behind this company. My co-founder Josh Bleecher
| Snyder has also been hanging around the internet for a while.
| There are several of us hacking away. It is very early days, we
| have a lot of work to do to earn your trust but it is my
| intention to do so.
| tekacs wrote:
| Pulled from your Github, just to make it easier for folks to
| make sense:
|
| > David Crawshaw - before this, CTO and co-founder of
| Tailscale
|
| > Josh Bleecher Snyder - was a Director of Engineering at
| Braintree, amongst other things
| farslan wrote:
| Both are also early Go engineers and developers who hacked
| on the Go stdlib for years. Most people in the Go community
| know them. Great people, and the idea speaks for it. I wish
| them best of luck.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| The devs are long time Go and Tailscale hackers, and have
| earned my trust several times over. They will earn yours too, I
| bet.
| llmslave2 wrote:
| Yeah it sounds pretty promising. Will def keep an eye out.
| Even just knowing who the humans behind the project goes a
| long way.
| montroser wrote:
| Some actual details here:
|
| https://exe.dev/docs/how-exedev-works
|
| https://exe.dev/docs/pricing
| ruined wrote:
| this post is downvoted, but these links are the meat everyone
| is complaining about missing
| dang wrote:
| Please don't comment about downvotes. This is in the site
| guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| If the downvotes were inappropriate, other users will usually
| correct them. In this case the comment ended up being heavily
| upvoted.
|
| Unfortunately, complaints like the one you added don't get
| garbage-collected when that happens, so they linger on,
| adding noise to the thread.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! We've added those links to the top text above.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Is that the OpenBSD logo they're using?!
| jeffrallen wrote:
| No, it's a reference to the OpenSSH one.
| j0lol wrote:
| Other than a quick boot, what separates this from going on a VPS
| provider and spinning up servers?
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Simpler and easier seems to be the answer. How much does it
| cost to spread 8gbs RAM across some VMs? Most providers require
| additional of how many VMs over how many hours, what the specs
| kf each are specifically, etc. Then once you have it you're
| setting up an SSH key or shared password depending on use and
| they make the authentication simpler as well. Maybe wouldn't be
| great for a huge business but it's you just wanted the ability
| to play with an isolated server, it might be worth it.
| subdavis wrote:
| 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.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| 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.)
| wmf wrote:
| The value proposition appears to be CLI cred.
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| The docs remark "VMs share the resources allocated to the user"
| so I interpret as resources allocated to your account, VMs
| provisioned within those limits.
| crawshaw wrote:
| No I apologize for the confusion (exe.dev person here). What is
| different about this service is you get dedicated resources
| that you share between your VMs. The initial allocation is
| conservative, we want to give people more (or drop the price).
|
| The goal is to reduce the marginal cost of creating a VM to
| zero. Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix
| users, just make another VM.
|
| (I will get a better version of this table online tonight.)
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix
| users, just make another VM.
|
| What is the advantage of this? Unless you need something
| exotic like different kernel configurations per instance,
| what's the problem with using containers on the same
| instance?
|
| BTW, a Hetzner dedicated server with 2 CPUs/8GB RAM that
| would let me run my own hypervisor is about $14 USD/month.
| For anyone who's a big enough power user to care about the
| distinction of running distributed workflows on VMs versus
| containers, I'm not sure that an extra $5/month is worth your
| "hypervisor as a service." But then again, HN commenters
| infamously poopooed Dropbox [0], so what do I know? :-)
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| crawshaw wrote:
| Containers aren't enough for me. I like to do things like
| create TUN devices, run docker compose, etc. I believe the
| VM is a fundamentally better abstraction.
|
| Consider this: sometimes when you are using a VPS, you
| start a new project and say to yourself, "I should put this
| on a new VPS." Not all the time, but it does happen. And
| when it does, we are faced with the problem that starting a
| new project immediately costs us $X/month. I would like a
| new project to initially cost nothing.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > create TUN devices
|
| Is that possible and useful with exe.dev? The docs say:
|
| On the networking side, we don't give your VM its own
| public IP. Instead, we terminate HTTPS/TLS requests, and
| proxy them securely to your VM's web servers. For SSH, we
| handle ssh vmname.exe.xyz.
|
| > run docker compose
|
| You can run multiple compose stacks in a single VPS.
|
| > you start a new project and say to yourself, "I should
| put this on a new VPS."
|
| I never did that.
| crawshaw wrote:
| Tun devices are possible and useful on exe.dev today,
| because it means, for example, you can install the full
| copy of Tailscale.
|
| But to your point: if a single VPS meets all your needs
| and you do not feel constrained by the marginal cost of
| another VPS then the exe pricing model is not going to
| bring you much value. Perhaps the automatic TLS
| termination and auth proxy with link sharing is useful.
| But if not, then it sounds like you are well served by
| existing products.
| danecjensen wrote:
| Is exe.dev just a better version of sketch.dev or do they
| both have a different use case?
| lejalv wrote:
| > dedicated Are plan CPUs pinned/reserved (dedicated) or
| time-shared with other customers under load, and what
| contention should I expect?
| pkphilip wrote:
| You guys really need to work on simplifying your
| communication on your website. I was also very confused about
| how the 8GB - whether it is per VM, shared etc.
| nebezb wrote:
| I thought it was pretty clear from their documentation. And
| it solves an issue I have. They've found a customer in me.
| rsync wrote:
| Is rsync installed in the stock vm environment by default?
|
| Asking for a friend...
| crawshaw wrote:
| [exe.dev co-founder here] exedev@scarlet-
| canyon:~$ rsync --version rsync version 3.2.7
| protocol version 31
| Copyright (C) 1996-2022 by Andrew Tridgell, Wayne Davison,
| and others.
|
| Our base image is most of an Ubuntu server. We trim out,
| for example, systemd features that are designed for working
| with system hardware, and then add a lot of standard
| software, as our block device cloning is a lot faster and
| more efficient than apt. So you will find vim, git, go,
| curl, sqlite3, etc all installed. If you think something
| obvious is missing please let us know!
| varenc wrote:
| Would love it if Tailscale came pre-installed! Or even
| better: some simple way to make it so every VM I start up
| is automatically/easily part of my Tailnet.
|
| p.s. thanks for making Tailscale. And I'm loving exe.dev
| so far!
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| That's decent value considering the price of a vps is close for
| much more work.
|
| The only difference is the bandwidth: vps in europe givr you 10
| tiles that, unmeterred.
|
| Very cool for training: I can make people log into those vm and
| deploy nginx just for learning.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| It's not actually a VM - it's a container, and they are
| fundamentally different. This feels like false advertising.
| earthnail wrote:
| I guess the question is: can I run systemd services ob their
| VMs? If not, then yeah that's false advertising.
|
| But my perception from the homepage is you can. Am I wrong?
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| 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/
| orangea wrote:
| See also, for comparison: https://www.val.town/
| vogtb wrote:
| Val.town seems to be serverless, where as this is explicitly a
| server. One is really a subset of the other though, so I
| suppose if you're deploying ts functions to a service/server,
| and your execution costs match up with the tiers here, exe.dev
| could be cheaper.
| bhavaniravi wrote:
| Are there any fundamental differences between E2B and this?
| crawshaw wrote:
| Hello, exe.dev person here.
|
| I have not used E2B (though I really like their web site),
| though it looks like there are quite a few differences. Our
| disks are persistent (without manual snapshotting), we have a
| TLS proxy by default with built-in auth and link sharing.
|
| It also looks like they have many features we do not have
| (yet).
|
| I believe the target use is also quite different. You can use
| exe.dev VMs for running your agent. But you can also use it for
| hosting your site. E.g. blog.exe.dev is an exe.dev VM.
| bhavaniravi wrote:
| Thanks for the response. In the "How exe works" page, it's
| mentioned that exe runs on bare metal with Kata containers,
| how is it different from firecracker? Were there any
| advantages?
| crawshaw wrote:
| The mention of Kata is out of date, we are fixing that,
| thanks! Our underlying VMM is very similar to firecracker
| (same upstream source). We believe our advantages are in
| how we run it. Several blog posts are in the works about
| technical details!
| twotwotwo wrote:
| 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.)
| hobofan wrote:
| > persistent and public
|
| I don't think that it's actually public? From one of their
| explainers, no public IP is assigned, so you'll need to ar
| least have to use an additional service like Cloudflare Tunnel
| to use it for hosting anything.
| crawshaw wrote:
| [exe.dev co-founder here] You can make it public! Our TLS
| proxy supports it, and supports CNAME rules (plus a top-level
| trick) to let you put a domain name on it. To make the HTTP
| server on port 8000 of your VM public run:
| ssh exe.dev share set-public <yourvmname>
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Any plans to support non web stuff?
| crawshaw wrote:
| For non-web stuff you will need a static IP. We plan to
| support that in the near future:
| https://github.com/boldsoftware/exe.dev/issues/6
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Could also support sni/sslh style stuff to support more
| protocols without static IP.
| crawshaw wrote:
| We could! Do you have any in mind? I can file issues for
| them.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| I'd love to see XMPP support especially, which I know
| sslh supports.
| twotwotwo wrote:
| FWIW, here are (mostly) their agent's tips for other agents
| from exploring a mostly-new system including tidbits like how
| to get recent Node: https://s3.us-
| east-1.amazonaws.com/1FV6XMQKP2T0D9M8FF82-cach...
|
| It's very much a snapshot of what happens to come on a new VM
| today, and I put a little disclaimer in it to try to help tools
| get unstuck if anything there proves to be outdated or a flat-
| out (accidental) lie.
| waldrews wrote:
| 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?
| copperx wrote:
| 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)
| integralid wrote:
| It's not possible to run real VMs with docker (though you can
| get something similar with qemu). VM isolation is also much
| stronger than docker's, and VMs tend to be much more secure.
|
| But if you just need a shell then yes, you can make something
| similar with docker.
| dominicm wrote:
| 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
| crawshaw wrote:
| [exe.dev co-founder] Or don't throw them away! The disk
| persists. And thank you!
| steeleduncan wrote:
| Sorry if I missed this in the docs, but how robust is the
| persistence? ie is it the disk that comes with a standard AWS
| VM? or is it a share backed by e.g. Ceph with multiple
| redundant copies?
| crawshaw wrote:
| Details coming in the next few weeks. The contents are
| regularly replicated to a disk cluster, though we have some
| more experimentation to do before we commit to exactly how
| frequently. This space has a lot of trade-offs, we believe
| we have found a new and interesting one.
| jdndbene wrote:
| ssh exe.dev gives me login required. What am I doing wrong?
| fragmede wrote:
| If we're just throwing out ssh targets, there's also
| funky.nondeterministic.computer
| adtac wrote:
| 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 :)
|
| [1] https://exe.dev/docs/login-with-exe
| ffsm8 wrote:
| That's called forward auth - or proxy auth
|
| You can do the same thing - with the added burden of actually
| having to set it up once ... After you set it up, it's however
| just as trivial to add new systems like with this linked
| example.
|
| I got pretty much everything I'm self-hosting like that via
| keycloak (which itself let's me do social with via GitHub and
| Google etc pp) and a very similar nginx config like it's shown
| in these docs.
|
| But the initial setup took multiple hours, even if the adding
| new services which support forward/proxy auth is extremely easy
| now.
|
| (Jellyfin sadly doesn't as an example)
|
| Just saying it in case you want to check it out.
|
| I think it's fantastic they added that/provide this to their
| platform - it's a wonderful value-add
| sureglymop wrote:
| I think running and managing and possibly misconfiguring a
| keycloak java monolith would be exactly what I'd want to
| avoid which is why it's cool that they offer this.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| There are a lot other identity providers around you can
| pick from, I merely mentioned it as I personally use it, as
| it's so easy to run and integrate with social auth - and
| comes with features such as simple password-less auth.
|
| The forward auth/proxy auth is not a keycloak feature, it's
| a proxy feature, which just need some identity provider. If
| you look for the mentioned term via Google or AI/llm you
| will find multiple options, some of which are as easy to
| setup as a simple docker run cmd with an open port
|
| I.e. https://docs.goauthentik.io/add-secure-
| apps/providers/proxy/...
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| The problem without having consent is that it's easy to track
| who is using your service. Because there's no consent, they can
| redirect you to login and back, and grab your identity, without
| you doing anything other than loading the page.
| kosolam wrote:
| Err it doesn't work on mobile
| crawshaw wrote:
| [exe.dev co-founder] Hi! There is a mobile site. It is not
| super visible right now but you can use it to create VMs (and
| even build something on them with our agent if you like). If
| you ran into a particular bug I would love to get it in the
| issue tracker so we can fix it.
| sccxy wrote:
| 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.
| anttiharju wrote:
| I can see
|
| > ssh exe.dev
|
| > The disk persists. You have sudo.
|
| on mobile
| sccxy wrote:
| It is showing non-stop loading blink but nothing happens.
|
| And cannot open keyboard if that is needed. It is like big
| CTA but does not do anything.
|
| Very strange landing page for maybe cool product.
| CiaranMcNulty wrote:
| It's not a loading blink, it's just some text telling you
| what the service is
| 867-5309 wrote:
| it's a cursor ready blink
|
| I think knowing what the ssh command does is a pretty low
| bar for this platform
| Kiro wrote:
| Hyperbole much? I'm on mobile and think it's great. I wish more
| websites were like this. Just straight to the point instead of
| all the regular marketing fluff you need to decipher.
| machinationu wrote:
| pricing information and what it does/how it works is not
| marketing fluff
| ErneX wrote:
| I thought it was a web game.
| Jolter wrote:
| It is not "to the point".
| _init_wasfine wrote:
| Agreed. Target audience will understand instantly
| deanc wrote:
| I wouldn't go that far but some link to pricing and
| documentation would be useful. I have absolutely no idea what
| the offering is here without those pieces of info.
| sznio wrote:
| Yeah. I managed to backtrack my way to the pricing through
| the about page.
|
| It's really annoying when you're interested in a product but
| can't find a price.
| x-complexity wrote:
| Their pricing page says that it's currently a free trial.
|
| https://exe.dev/docs/pricing
| codingdave wrote:
| Not a mobile issue. I am on desktop and had no idea what this
| service was because nothing on the initial UI explained what we
| were looking at. I went and double-checked when people here
| were talking about pricing and VMs. From the home page, I
| figured it was some text-based game or experiment and closed
| the page.
|
| It looks like some people who work there are watching this
| thread, so to them I say: You have _got_ to explain what this
| is, not just say "the disk persists..." and expect people to
| dig deeper. Most aren't that curious.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| It's odd to see how people are not accustomed to plain
| websites anymore. You click the 'About' link in the footer,
| and get a direct explanation of what it is, pricing and the
| entire documentation.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| why do we need to click anything? Why wouldn't the relevant
| information be there in the initial view?
| ascii0eks84 wrote:
| Gatekeeping mechanism. This effectively filters useless
| traffic and trash contacts.
| albedoa wrote:
| You truly, honestly believe that to be the real problem?
| Come on. You don't need to do whatever this is.
| kgeist wrote:
| >From the home page, I figured it was some text-based game or
| experiment and closed the page.
|
| Same, my first thought was that it's some pentesting game
| where you're given a VM and your task is to somehow break it.
| The line "the disk persists. you have sudo" sounds like game
| rules.
| kmoser wrote:
| I thought it was one of those game sites where you had to
| "hack" it every step of the way to advance the next level.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| The website has a huge `ssh exe.dev`, so I'd expect that
| running that works, but: SSH keys are
| required to access exe.dev.
|
| Why put an SSH command in a huge banner if I have to go
| around and register before I can use it anyway?
| pxx wrote:
| you don't need to register the key. just have some sort of
| key.
| smallnix wrote:
| Agree, I finally found information via
|
| Homepage -> blog -> docs -> "all docs" button:
|
| https://exe.dev/docs/list
|
| Which has an about and pricing etc.
|
| That is very counterintuitive to just find out what this is.
| fredsted wrote:
| It's kind of funny our experiences are so diffent. I almost
| immediately surmised it's some sort of on the fly generated vm
| you can access via a ssh jumpserver. Which it is! It's actually
| really neat. It's quite obvious that the authors want us to
| just ssh into it and try it out first.
| lnenad wrote:
| > I almost immediately surmised it's some sort of on the fly
| generated vm you can access via a ssh jumpserver
|
| How? It just says `ssh exe.dev`. Unless you are clairvoyant.
| integralid wrote:
| "ssh exe.dev" is exactly the Linux command you would use to
| connect there via ssh. And it's stylized like command
| prompt.
| rnewme wrote:
| Except it doesn't trigger the keyboard on my phone and I
| can't interact with it.
| TJSomething wrote:
| It's not interactive. It's just an extremely brief
| brochure for the actual service, which is available via
| SSH. All the useful copy is under the About link at the
| bottom, which is so light as to fail WCAG contrast
| standards.
| flexagoon wrote:
| The question wasn't "how to ssh into a server", it was
| "how did you figure out what it it from looking at the
| website"
| doublerabbit wrote:
| "exe.dev is a subscription service that gives you virtual
| machines, with persistent disks, quickly and without
| fuss."
|
| scroll down and hit the "about" link. I do agree though
| the landing page could be more resourceful.
|
| I'm not going to SSH to a random server.
| lnenad wrote:
| That's my point, the home/landing page tells you nothing
| other than "try to ssh into this van"
| panxyh wrote:
| All a malicious website has to do to be convincing is to
| have a more conventional landing page then?
|
| The disk and sudo mentioned are good enough clues, then
| you have the _about_.
| lnenad wrote:
| Where did I say that, that wasn't a topic I just
| commented on the *entirety* of the content on the landing
| page.
|
| > The disk and sudo mentioned are good enough clues
|
| I mean, you do you and let's agree to disagree about a
| good landing page UX.
| pxx wrote:
| tbh maybe this service doesn't want you as a customer if
| you can't figure this out. it seems like you'd be an
| above-average support burden
| lnenad wrote:
| You made me lol
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Are you honestly suggesting that startups should be picky
| about taking on customers?
|
| That's probably the oddest thing to read on a tech VC
| forum.
|
| The lading page was garbage. It's forgivable because
| designing goods landing pages is hard. But inventing
| wacky ideas about why a bad landing page might have some
| hidden genius, isnt constructive feedback
| lnenad wrote:
| Why are you giving in to such a troll/AI/low effort
| comment. If the page was some genius implication and I
| were too stupid to get it then his comment had a good
| point. The page has a random ssh command and this dude
| thinks it's genius.
| kelvich wrote:
| > I'm not going to SSH to a random server.
|
| Opening a random website likely exposes you to more risk.
| enneff wrote:
| Likely? Definitely.
| PcChip wrote:
| Because it literally tells you what to do
| codezero wrote:
| How to ssh into a server isn't a question, it's a
| command.
| gavinray wrote:
| You are not the target audience if "how" was not apparent
| to you
| andai wrote:
| I became target audience after I had a cup of coffee...
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I am the target audience and I still had no idea what the
| site was promoting from just the landing page.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Someone else said it's not actually interactive. So which
| is it?
| lnenad wrote:
| I mean, I've done engineering work for the last 15 years
| on most layers of the stack. Seeing an ssh command into a
| fancy url does not tell me anything about what that is
| going to accomplish. But yeah, you must be right.
| as1mov wrote:
| The "how" is very obvious, but not the "why". I'd assume
| this much would be very apparent from the OPs complaint,
| but apparently not I guess...
| davsti4 wrote:
| Yep, with no privacy policy published.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| Exactly.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| i'm not sure what you mean; the demo runs with the ssh command
| in the centre, there's an 'about' link at the bottom, and that
| links to a docs index
|
| it's fiine i think
| derrida wrote:
| It would be funny if it was literally the best website I've
| seen in like a year...
|
| ... which it is.
| lfkdev wrote:
| Come on guys, it literally says 'ssh exe.dev'
| ilvez wrote:
| Yeah, and it really is not I would want to do, just like
| diving into unknown water that sparkles weird.. It's an
| instinct, can get past it but to get more info about the
| service... nah.
| vntok wrote:
| That's okay, you're not in the target audience is all.
| as1mov wrote:
| If their target audience is someone who remotes into a
| random machine because a opaque landing page them to,
| it's probably not gonna work very well. Those people are
| too busy sniffing glue.
| jedimastert wrote:
| The exact text on mobile is
|
| > ssh exe.dev
|
| > The disk persists. You have sudo.
|
| I've seen enough of these kinds of services in my lifetime that
| I also immediately knew what it was, for example sdf.org, which
| is one of the OG services, and various "tilde" services like
| tilde.town.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I thought the same, but it's not quite like either of those
| things. It has their same benefits but way more flexibility
| with its VM model. It offers auth, and will forward most
| ports for developer access.
|
| All this was totally lost on me from looking at the website.
| "I already have tilde and sdf, I don't need this."
|
| If I hadn't looked into the comments I would still think
| that.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Did you try clicking one link into "about" and reading one
| paragraph of text?
| Havoc wrote:
| That as my first thought too. Landing page may as well be an
| empty page
| eleventyseven wrote:
| I was confused too. I first thought I should open up my
| terminal and just enter `ssh dev.exe` and this would be some
| kind of ssh-based interface? Honestly my first thought is that
| it would be one of those cool dev hack / art projects like the
| old starwars traceroute to 216.81.59.173
|
| It didn't read as a company with products at all to me from the
| front page. Just a cryptic " The disk persists. You have sudo."
| with links to "Login" and "About * Blog * Discord" --- no
| pricing link, which made me think it was a weird hobby / art.
| shenberg wrote:
| ssh exe.dev works
| kelvich wrote:
| This thread seems to reflect how the HN audience has shifted --
| less commenters know what `ssh example.com` does and more
| commenters concerned about privacy policy.
| GalaxyNova wrote:
| Is there a reason for the lack of IPv6 support?
| crawshaw wrote:
| [exe.dev co-founder here] It is planned! The reason we have not
| got to it yet is it needs to be very different than IPv4
| support. We have spent a lot of time on machinery to allow `ssh
| yourmachine.exe.xyz` work without having to allocate you an
| IPv4 address. The mechanisms for IPv6 can and should be
| different, but they will also interact with how assigning
| public static IPv4 addresses will work in the future.
|
| We do not want to end up in the state AWS is in, where any
| production work requires navigating the differences between how
| AWS manage v4 and v6. And that means rolling out v6 is going to
| be a lot of work for us. It will get done.
|
| I added a public tracking bug here:
| https://github.com/boldsoftware/exe.dev/issues/16
| TekMol wrote:
| 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"
|
| What is "exe.dev repl"? Am I not in a shell?
| me: bash the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found:
| "bash"
|
| Damn, it seems the "shell" is not a Linux shell?
| crawshaw wrote:
| [exe.dev co-founder here] Hi there, I am not sure exactly where
| you are, but your VM is ubuntu derived and definitely starts
| with apt and bash. Perhaps try `ssh yourvm.exe.xyz`?
|
| Thanks for trying it!
| TekMol wrote:
| I can't use a native ssh client. I am using a browser. I
| clicked on "Shell" on top of the screen.
|
| Oh, I think I found a real shell now! You have to click "VMs"
| then on the VM and then "Terminal".
|
| Yay, this is great!
| setheron wrote:
| While at tailscale you built sketch.dev only to actually
| build this product ? Love it. Ultimate yak shave. Kind of how
| like Antithesis was the product inside foundationdb.
| fredsted wrote:
| What you connect to first is the exe.dev jump server/management
| interface. You can ssh into your vm from there. Try typing help
| _init_wasfine wrote:
| Nmap 52.35.87.134 (exe.dev) Returns many open ports
| m-hodges wrote:
| This is awesome. Would love to see a slimmer tier closer to a DO
| droplet or Hetzner instance that's ~$5-8 / month.
| crawshaw wrote:
| [exe.dev co-founder here] Thank you! Not to give too many
| secrets away, but my hope is to follow a business model I have
| been part of before, and make it as cheap as possible for
| individuals so they encourage their employers to buy it for
| work. So I would very much love to get cheaper.
|
| The two constraints are that, one, when small underlying
| resources are expensive (we hope to fix that soon by not being
| small!), and two, we do not want to make the resource
| allocation so small that the VM feels unpleasant to use. So
| there is a floor on how small we make them.
|
| That said, I very very much want to drop prices. We started
| with conservative numbers.
| dependency_2x wrote:
| With Shelly (and assuming a decent number of tokens) $20 is
| very good I think. But not everyone wants an AI.
| aarning wrote:
| This seems to be a honeypot for associating your SSH public key
| with other identifying details.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| It is a paid service, delivering a valuable developer tool, and
| which indeed uses ssh keys for authentication.
|
| So, exactly what you said, but for the benefit of the user, and
| for the profit of the company, by offering an excellent
| product.
|
| (I am a happy customer of their previous product, Sketch.dev.)
| fartfeatures wrote:
| Hardly, you can use .ssh/config to configure an SSH key just
| for this service.
| sznio wrote:
| 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.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Does anyone know e.g. a small systemd-nspawn oneliner to SSH in
| securely?
| icedrift wrote:
| There's nothing dangerous about SSHing into an untrusted server
| unless you're using the same keys for everything.
| otterley wrote:
| Remote resources only get your public key. It's meant to be
| shared! Hence the word "public."
|
| The threat is having a private key stolen, in which case,
| having multiple keys can mitigate the amount of damage a
| threat actor can do. However, to steal your private key would
| involve a successful attack against your client, not against
| any server you might have given the public key to.
| enneff wrote:
| There is also the threat of the server sending a data
| sequence that exploits a vulnerability in your terminal. It
| has happened before, but it's rare.
| pingiun wrote:
| How do you proxy the SSH connections? I thought you could not do
| hostname-based proxying with the SSH protocol
| crawshaw wrote:
| [exe.dev co-founder here] You are right, you cannot! It was
| quite a bit of work. We have a blog post in the works that
| should come out in a couple of weeks with all the details.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| I was just sufficiently nerd sniped by this, so let me know
| if I'm close:
|
| Based on what the commenter below found about sshpiper I
| believe that you use the ssh identity + the ip from the slot
| to resolve the vm target. sshpiper knows how to route the ssh
| identity + slot ip to the correct VM. I suspect you have a
| custom sshpiper plugin to do that routing.
|
| You use the slot record indirection so you can change the ip
| of a slot without having to update everyone's A records
| across the customer base. It also makes it easy to shuffle
| around vm-slot mappings within a customer. I haven't tested,
| but I'm guessing this dns server is internal (coredns?), and
| the ips too.
|
| I did something similar (ip + identity routing) for a project
| a few weeks ago. Yours is a lot more elegant with the dns
| indirection.
|
| I'm no ssh expert, but in theory you should be able to ssh -J
| exe.dev myvm.exe.xyz for a one-liner? Or maybe you don't even
| need it, if that DNS server within the ssh exe.dev is the
| same as the public DNS. Pardon for not testing it yet!
| chiragjn wrote:
| Would be interested in this too, I did some work in the past to
| make it work via Envoy proxy using HTTP CONNECT but that
| requires plugging in proxytunnel[0] or nc on client side.
| > $ nslookup abc.exe.xyz > abc.exe.xyz canonical name =
| s001.exe.xyz. > $ telnet s001.exe.xyz 22 >
| Trying 100.20.12.135... > Connected to s001.exe.xyz.
| > Escape character is '^]'. > SSH-2.0-SSHPiper
|
| Looks like it uses sshpiper[1]?
|
| [0] https://github.com/proxytunnel/proxytunnel
|
| [1] https://github.com/tg123/sshpiper
| dizzled wrote:
| Looks like it's a combination of SSH server IP address + public
| key.
|
| Each VM you create (up to 25 of them) gets a different CNAME
| record of the form s0 _NN_.exe.xyz where _NN_ ranges from 01 to
| 25. Each of these names, from s001.exe.xyz to s025.exe.xyz,
| resolves to a different IP address.
|
| Therefore the individual VM can be distinguished this way, and
| the account they are associated with can be identified using
| the SSH public key that is used to authenticate.
| tarrydev13 wrote:
| 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?
| Uptrenda wrote:
| 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?
| dependency_2x wrote:
| 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
| skybrian wrote:
| Nobody can see this until you make the website public. (Test
| with a browser's Incognito mode.)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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/githu
| b.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
| crawshaw wrote:
| [exe.dev co-founder here] As of the past few minutes, some of
| our VMs are having intermittent network access issues. Working
| on it now.
|
| UPDATE: this is fixed now.
| Balinares wrote:
| 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?
| steeleduncan wrote:
| None of this actually matters. If you want to keep your data
| private, host it on your own hardware. Countries, company
| policies, etc are all essentially irrelevant
| system33- wrote:
| They terminate TLS. It seems like you wouldn't want to use this
| service even if all those questions were answered to your
| satisfaction.
| mmmmbbbhb wrote:
| $20 a mo seems overpriced.
| minimal_action wrote:
| 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)
| Kwpolska wrote:
| 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.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I find ssh faster and easier. Anyway it's a good
| differentiator, there are plenty of web panels already.
| anomancer wrote:
| 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. ```
| finalhacker wrote:
| I like it. Great cli design. its so cool!
| drakmail wrote:
| 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
| icedrift wrote:
| 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.
| mrs6969 wrote:
| 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
| miki123211 wrote:
| 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/
| crabmusket wrote:
| That is neat trick, and interesting to know that's how ssh
| git@github.com works, but that does not feel practical for a
| real usecase. Aside from relying on a scrape of the Github
| users API (there's no "look up user by pubkey" API), what if I
| wasn't expecting to automatically log in with Github?
| jcgl wrote:
| Absolutely. For example, if I use specific SSH keys for
| specific hosts.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Wouldn't that be solvable with subdomains? Eg
|
| ssh crabmusket.github.exe.dev
| natrys wrote:
| 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.
| vjay15 wrote:
| really cool stuff!
| wenjian wrote:
| I build a website using this interesting product, for anyone who
| want to checkout what it could be built
|
| https://road-kernel.exe.xyz/
|
| also it's a bad ui meme
| derrida wrote:
| access denied.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| same
| engr wrote:
| I just tried this, genuinely groundbreaking! So quick to spin a
| VM and get going
| tmsbrg wrote:
| Seems it's overloaded now. I like the UX though. My usual
| question with any hosting is how do you avoid this being abused
| by hackers, scammers, etc.? Right now it's easy to just create
| any VMs for free based on a mail account, that seems ripe for
| exploitation (maybe it's down now cause someone's exploiting it?)
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I really like the concept, the persistence (with backups!), pre-
| installed agents, and how easy it is to go from experiment to a
| live server.
|
| The downsides:
|
| - usage-based pricing would be nice, $20/month is pretty steep to
| start, but also no room to scale up?
|
| - 100GB/month is only 300k views for a small-ish page or API, 10k
| req/day is a tiny amount of traffic. Can't make anything public
| with that. Even the smallest servers at Hetzner have unlimited
| bandwidth
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Those limits make it pretty clear it's not really meant for
| hosting a production app. It's for sharing something you've
| developed with friends/colleagues, or maybe a low traffic
| webhook handler for some personal thing. I made an Alexa skill
| for my kids once and it is perfect for that kind of project.
| paxys wrote:
| This costs twice as much as something like Hetzner for the same
| resources. What's the benefit?
| dizzled wrote:
| I was curious about the HTTP proxying, so here is a site showing
| how it looks on the VM side, displaying headers of the incoming
| request: https://hydra-cloud.exe.xyz
|
| It also runs whois on the forwarded-for IP address, and displays
| netstat and ps output.
|
| Interestingly the request comes from localhost. Not sure why that
| is.
| dizzled wrote:
| Also curious about Shelley, their LLM agent. Turns out it makes
| requests to a proxy for https://fireworks.ai APIs via
| http://169.254.169.254/gateway/llm, such as:
| POST
| /gateway/llm/_/gateway/fireworks/inference/v1/chat/completions
| HTTP/1.1 Host: 169.254.169.254 User-Agent: Go-
| http-client/1.1 Content-Length: 491 Accept:
| application/json Authorization: Bearer implicit
| Content-Type: application/json Accept-Encoding: gzip
| {"model":"accounts/fireworks/models/qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instr
| uct","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Generate a short,
| descriptive slug (2-6 words, lowercase, hyphen-separated) for a
| conversation that starts with this user
| message:\n\nhello\n\nThe slug should:\n- Be concise and
| descriptive\n- Use only lowercase letters, numbers, and
| hyphens\n- Capture the main topic or intent\n- Be suitable as a
| filename or URL path\n\nRespond with only the slug, nothing
| else."}],"max_tokens":8192}
|
| And, perhaps of more interest, actual conversations which start
| with the system prompt: POST
| /gateway/llm/_/gateway/fireworks/inference/v1/chat/completions
| HTTP/1.1 Host: 169.254.169.254 User-Agent: Go-
| http-client/1.1 Content-Length: 10513 Accept:
| application/json Authorization: Bearer implicit
| Content-Type: application/json Accept-Encoding: gzip
| {"model":"accounts/fireworks/models/qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instr
| uct","messages":[{"role":"system","content":"You are Shelley, a
| coding agent and assistant. You are an experienced software
| engineer and architect. You communicate with brevity.\n\nYou
| have access to a variety of tools to get your job done. Be
| persistent and creative.\n\n ...
|
| Truncated as it's huge, but here's a copy of the request data:
| https://victory-george.exe.xyz. Interesting to see the range of
| tools offered by the agent.
| dizzled wrote:
| Turns out the request is coming from localhost because it's
| being forwarded over SSH. Their HTTP proxy causes a new SSH
| connection to be made to the VM: Connection
| from 10.42.0.1 port 37456 on 10.42.1.75 port 22 rdomain ""
| debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_9.9
| debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version Go
| debug1: compat_banner: no match: Go
|
| Which then requests a local TCP connection, in this case to
| port 8000: debug1: Entering interactive
| session for SSH2.
| debug1: server_init_dispatch
| debug3: receive packet: type 90
| debug1: server_input_channel_open: ctype direct-tcpip rchan 0
| win 2097152 max 32768 debug1:
| server_request_direct_tcpip: originator 0.0.0.0 port 0, target
| 127.0.0.1 port 8000 debug1: connect_next: start for
| host 127.0.0.1 ([127.0.0.1]:8000)
| debug2: fd 7 setting O_NONBLOCK
| debug2: fd 7 setting TCP_NODELAY
| debug1: connect_next: connect host 127.0.0.1 ([127.0.0.1]:8000)
| in progress, fd=7 debug3: fd 7 is O_NONBLOCK
| debug3: fd 7 is O_NONBLOCK
| debug1: channel 0: new direct-tcpip [direct-tcpip] (inactive
| timeout: 0) debug1:
| server_input_channel_open: confirm direct-tcpip
| debug3: channel 0: waiting for connection
|
| This is in contrast to a normal SSH shell session:
| debug1: Entering interactive session for SSH2.
| debug1: server_init_dispatch
| debug3: receive packet: type 90
| debug1: server_input_channel_open: ctype session rchan 0 win
| 2097152 max 32768 debug1: input_session_request
| debug1: channel 0: new session [server-session] (inactive
| timeout: 0) debug2: session_new: allocate (allocated 0
| max 10) debug3:
| session_unused: session id 0 unused
| debug1: session_new: session 0
| debug1: session_open: channel 0
| debug1: session_open: session 0: link with channel 0
| debug1: server_input_channel_open: confirm session
| debug3: send packet: type 91
| debug3: receive packet: type 98
| debug1: server_input_channel_req: channel 0 request pty-req
| reply 1 debug1: session_by_channel: session 0 channel 0
| debug1: session_input_channel_req: session 0 req pty-req
| debug1: Allocating pty.
| asasidh wrote:
| It's a VM hosting service folks.
| pacificat0r wrote:
| Who puts pricing under docs/ ?
| varenc wrote:
| Just setup an account and started a VM, but it's hanging when
| trying to access it while waiting on the public key response. Web
| based terminal not loading either. Guessing the site is getting
| the hug-of-death from HN users?
| varenc wrote:
| Took a bit, but now I'm in! So far, loving this service. Seems
| plenty worth $20/month.
| cekanoni wrote:
| very cool idea and concept :)
|
| some feedback:
|
| No matter what i do, i can't ssh into VM that i created Local
| terminal; always timeout built in terminal; SSH handshake failed:
| ssh: handshake failed: EOF
|
| shelley agent seems to be install, but it always shows isn't
| running.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Likewise. I think it might be experiencing a hug of death :)
| Havoc wrote:
| Looks good!
|
| Though not a fan of 100GB and egress charges. Is there a way to
| hardcap that?
|
| I guess I could implement something VM side but that's a bit
| convoluted
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| unlike others, i like the site and the initial prompt.
|
| Lost me at "verify email" though. Why get so creative, yet limit
| yourself to archaic "email". Why do *YOU* the provider need me to
| have an email or a phone?
|
| Look, mullvad can provide vpn services without email or all that
| nonsense. If you want people who will use ssh to order things,
| these are the same people that would get your service because
| you're not asking for dumb things like email. It's the first
| thing you ask of potential users, and it's an obstacle preventing
| them from giving you their money!
|
| You can issue users a recovery/access key and/or let them user
| their ssh public key and trust they know how to manage that on
| their own. If you have messages for them, display that when they
| login. This sort of stuff differentiates your service, ssh does
| too, but it's cosmetic and gimmicky. I would prefer a rest-api
| over ssh anyways, but ssh is cool too.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| You can't host compute for anonymous users. I mean you can, but
| you won't for long due to the abuse that will inevitably come
| with it. That you are responsible for. And anyway, it's not
| always going to be free.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Getting a usable e-mail and phone is a few cents spent on one
| of the many shady SMS-reception services.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Yes, that is why they always require a credit card as well.
| I'm sure exe.dev will be no different soon but they are
| trying this in alpha to get feedback and traction; just
| hoping they won't attract the notice of the barbarian
| hordes right away.
| docmars wrote:
| It isn't a free service -- only during the alpha you get access
| to an "Individual" account which would normally run $20/mo once
| the test period is over.
|
| https://exe.dev/docs/pricing
| qudat wrote:
| I run https://pico.sh where we don't ask for email. Even on our
| website we instruct users to generate a token so if they do
| lose their key they can use it to recover their account.
|
| People regularly lose their ssh keypair and also don't generate
| a token. I think using email as a form of recovery is totally
| fine and regardless when you have to pay for the service you're
| going to give up your email (and other personal info) via
| payment processor
| srfrog wrote:
| I'm confused, what is this? Cloud Vagrant ?
| killerstorm wrote:
| Hmm, looking through how-exedev-works, it seems like what you
| call VM is more like a container, i.e. it doesn't run its own
| kernel?
|
| Sort of a container which "feels like" a VM? Reminds me of
| Virtuozzo / OpenVZ VM approach which was popular ~20 years ago
| when RAM was expensive...
| breakingcups wrote:
| "VM creation is temporarily unavailable. Our apologies!"
| idorosen wrote:
| Interesting interface. Some feedback: - Email
| delay to Gmail inboxes for verifying an SSH key used via SSH via
| email is longer than the timeout of the "Waiting for verification
| email..." stage in the SSH key registration. Wait longer or
| provide a non-email way to authorize a new key. You could imagine
| a few ways to do this: Allow users to add/delete SSH keys from
| the website or exe.dev shell; create a bearer token/random string
| that I can generate from the exe.dev shell or website to
| associate a new SSH key; SSH key signatures (existing key signs
| new key); SSH CAs (like @cert-authority); etc. - SSH
| U2F/FIDO2 authentication support has become mainstream, and
| offers you a way to have homogeneous auth across web and SSH
| interfaces. Maybe consider unifying authN this way? -
| exe.dev ssh interface does not allow me to list SSH keys, only to
| delete them. Consider moving all authN/authZ functionality into
| an "auth" subcommand/submenu (like you have for "share") and
| support SSH pubkey CRUD in there. - You make some strong
| assumptions about email addresses that aren't true -- what
| happens on email address changes, lost email access, etc. This
| will become more important when you start billing (and possibly
| costly). - How do I manage persistent disks? Any way to
| attach them to a different VM after I'm done with them on the
| original one? Is there always a single PD per VM or can these be
| managed separately? What about data or database volumes? Can PDs
| be attached to one or multiple VMs at a time?
|
| At what scale do you break even on fixed costs (wages, rents,
| etc.)?
| _init_wasfine wrote:
| Looks like a trap at first. Who succesfully connecter ?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| talk about a shitty website
| 0pteron wrote:
| Tried both librewolf and edge and couldn't create a new VM via
| browser. https://exe.dev/create-vm returns a 303 see other, but
| then no VM is displayed
| rouanza wrote:
| very cool, my only reason for not using it is latency.
| recommendation: look up user's ip and geo location, spin up VM in
| a datacenter with lowest latency.
| vogtb wrote:
| Oh, we're doing Fly again? Cool! I don't mean that sarcastically
| -- making it dead simple to get a VM at a domain or IP in a few
| seconds is good and useful. We should keep trying this idea,
| because every time it gets easier.
|
| On a side note, a lot of people in this thread are doing a sort
| of "I don't get it, your website sucks" but it's like, come on
| dude! Just read the site! It takes less time to read the pricing,
| docs, and FAQ than it does to post about how you don't get it.
| rubslopes wrote:
| That's brilliant UX. I was vibe coding a webpage in minutes, and
| I could immediately check the results.
| loulouxiv wrote:
| As a test I used their Shelley coding agent to vibe-code a
| multiplayer Queen of spade game : https://extra-crimson.exe.xyz/
| Havoc wrote:
| Looks like it's AWS backed judging by IPs. Or at least the proxy
| part
| bnc319 wrote:
| This is awesome. I just maxxed out my tokens in Shelley, but was
| able to vibe code this Rails app that lets anyone register an
| aircraft and then fly it in a synchronized world interfaced
| through a Garmin G1000 knock off. Sign up (feel free to use a
| fake email address) and set up a flight now and let's see how
| many aircraft we can get going! If this is a cool idea let me
| know and I'll probably end up paying to continue developing this
| :)
|
| https://exexe.exe.xyz/cockpit
| benzguo wrote:
| This is cool! Check out https://zo.computer - a similar concept,
| with an IDE-like web UI
| 0xferruccio wrote:
| i tried this and it's pretty cool, that being said for my use
| case of spinning up many agents working on my app I'd need a way
| to specify the docker images that get started with each new VM
|
| i cannot find a way in the docs to start new VMs with a bootstrap
| script that starts a bunch of services for me and runs a specific
| docker image
|
| my use-case is that I want a full developer environment for every
| branch of my project, so i can vibe code on many VMs at a time
|
| EDIT: Just realised there's an image one can pass to the new
| command. Still it's not clear to me whether private images would
| be supported and what registry this is using:
|
| exe.dev > help new
|
| Command: new
|
| Create a new VM
|
| Options: --command container command: auto, none, or a custom
| command --env environment variable in KEY=VALUE format (can be
| specified multiple times) --image container image --json output
| in JSON format --name VM name (auto-generated if not specified)
| --no-email do not send email notification --prompt initial prompt
| to send to Shelley after VM creation (requires exeuntu image)
| gurjeet wrote:
| In https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev
|
| s/cloud computing should like/cloud computing should be like/
| cstricklan wrote:
| I normally try to stick to serverless with SST for quick projects
| because I like that they scale to $0, but this is enticing.
| Shelley is a great feature and must have well-designed system
| prompts and tools for testing the website built-in. It just one-
| shotted a volunteer management app and with just one more click
| in the console I can expose it to the public.
| mmcclure wrote:
| This is very cool, but goodness I wish they'd give an option for
| a password-based login after the initial verification. In ~10
| minutes of playing with it I had to go through 4 email
| confirmation steps.
|
| I'm very much into the product itself, but that would get
| extremely tiresome if I was trying to use it consistently. I
| assume I have to be using it wrong in some way for there to be
| that much friction...
| danecjensen wrote:
| Should I still be trying Sketch.dev, or is this just the better
| version of it?
| crawshaw wrote:
| [exe.dev co-founder here] This grew out of our work on sketch.
| We built a container-based system for it, and found ourselves
| saying "I wish we just had a computer." This is our answer to
| that.
|
| If you are interested in our work and agents, I would suggest
| trying Shelley, the little agent we have in exe.dev. There has
| been some discussion about what to do with sketch on its
| discord channel, but we won't be putting energy into it going
| forward.
|
| (A blog post with far more details is in the works.)
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