Thu, Sep 14, 2023Showcasing Startups on Replit
The fastest way to start, ship, and share The Replit platform isn't just a sandbox; it's a launchpad. There’s a lot to learn from startups building on Replit and how they leverage the platform to monetize and grow. Whether it’s a solo developer bootstrapping their time on Bounties, or a startup launching their production application on Replit Deployments, the businesses on Replit demonstrate that Replit is the best place for iteration and feedback cycles to carry a project from idea to product market fit. To prove this, we're sharing a few companies building and shipping on Replit today. Leap API - Headshot AI Add image, music, and other AI generations to your app in minutes with Leap's API and SDK. Leap launched “Headshot AI”, an app that allows you to generate a professional headshot in minutes. No need to schedule a professional headshot session for that perfect LinkedIn Photo. Just upload some of your existing photos to fine-tune the model to your face and get your professional results in minutes.
Wed, Sep 13, 2023Introducing the Replit Desktop App
Replit is first and foremost a cloud-based company. You can code, run, and deploy your favorite apps using virtually any technology or framework, all on one platform. But just because we’ve created a cloud-based product doesn’t mean that you have to be limited to using Replit in the browser. That’s why today we’re super excited to announce the official Replit Desktop App. About the app With the Replit Desktop App, you can finally enjoy a native Replit experience free of browser distractions, on macOS, Windows, and Linux. This new form factor allows you to stay focused on coding with a “zen-mode” like experience, quickly create multiple windows for different Repls, and easily access Replit from your dock or home screen.
Mon, Sep 11, 2023Deploy Bun Apps that Autoscale on Replit
Using Replit Autoscale Deployments, developers can launch Bun apps that automatically scale from zero to meet customer demand, combining the speed of Bun and the power of Replit infrastructure. Build, iterate, deploy, and scale directly within Replit in seconds. Here’s how you can create and deploy a Bun App to Replit Autoscale Deployments in less than a minute:
Thu, Sep 7, 2023HeyDATA.org Profile: Personalized AI Built with Replit Deployments
"I don't think I would ever be able to complete a project like this without Replit. I started not knowing anything about web development, (or even GitHub for that matter), and I've sort of just learned one skill at a time. I’ve gone from knowing almost nothing about technical development, to building a business and earning money" - Steve Moraco Steve Moraco leveraged Replit to build DATA, an AI service that replaces Siri with ChatGPT. In just a few months, Steve has scaled his AI business on Replit, growing rapidly to $18k MRR, 800 paid subscribers, and 100k+ impressions, with his site and project running on Replit Deployments. What is DATA?
Tue, Sep 5, 2023Announcing Autoscale and Static Deployments
Today, we are announcing our biggest release yet. Scalable hosting infrastructure directly from the editor. This release transforms Replit into an end-to-end platform to go from idea to production for your next project or startup. Two new products are immediately available to all Hacker and Pro subscribers: Autoscale Deployments - Infrastructure that scales up when your app goes viral and scales down when your app goes unused. Only pay for the resources you use. Static Deployments - Free option to host client-side sites like blogs and websites. Best of all, it's directly from the editor. Deploy to scalable infrastructure directly from the place you build. No additional vendors. Just Replit.
Tue, Sep 5, 2023Speeding up Deployments with Lazy Image Streaming
Replit Deployments is our new offering that allows you to quickly go from idea, to code, to production. To make the experience as seamless as possible, we built tooling to convert a Repl into a container imager which can be deployed to either a Google Cloud Virtual Machine or to Cloud Run. Early on, we started to hit some issues with large images taking too long to deploy to a virtual machine. It could take minutes to pull and unpack the container image before it could be started. There’s two angles of attack: reduce the image size or speed up the pulling of images. It's preferable to shrink the container image size; however, that is not always possible. In this post we’ll go into some of the technologies and approaches used to speed up image pulling/booting. What is a container image? First, we’ll need to establish some baseline knowledge around container images. If you already know the details, you can skip this section. At a high level, a container image provides both a root filesystem and configuration for running a containerized workload. Inside the container, the filesystem is mounted to the root directory /. The root filesystem is stored as a list of multiple compressed tarballs, called layers, which are overlaid on top of each other. That is, if two layers have the same file, layers later in the list have higher precedence and their files replace the files from lower layers.
Tue, Aug 29, 2023Showcasing Startups on Replit
The fastest way to start, ship, and share This past year, our team has been hard at work releasing some of our most advanced infrastructure improvements including dedicated hosting and increased storage capacity. A second-order effect of a more powerful Replit is the rapid growth of businesses being built on the platform. The Replit platform isn't just a sandbox; it's a launchpad. There’s a lot to learn from startups building on Replit. The success stories emerging from our ecosystem serve as case studies for developers. Their architectural decisions, scaling strategies, and innovative solutions can provide insights for others looking to tread a similar path. Here are some of the newest startups deployed on Replit:
Sun, Aug 27, 2023Upgrading Analytics for Deployments
Nine months ago, we launched analytics for every Repl. This feature allowed Explorers to view statistics about their Repl's visitors by appending /analytics to the end of Repl URLs. In the meantime, a lot has changed. Recently, we launched Reserved VM Deployments on Replit: an improved hosting service to quickly get you from idea to production. With Deployments, you can rest assured that your app will always be accessible even as you prototype changes, without needing to periodically ping the Repl to keep it running. Today, we’re excited to announce new and improved analytics for each of your Deployments! You can now find analytics in a tab under the Deployments pane in your Repl. As part of this release, the beta .repl.co analytics page will be deactivated. Analytics tab
Thu, Aug 24, 2023Packages: Powered Up
Package management on Replit just got an upgrade. We’re releasing new features that make it faster to load, simpler to manage, and easier to troubleshoot packages for your projects. Read on to learn about the new additions or try it out now on Replit! Why we built the Packages tool Software projects already demand enough from developers implementing features, leaving those same developers little time to build everything from scratch. Pulling in code from other organizations or individuals can jump-start projects and help ensure their security, functionality, and integrity. However, existing package management tools are disconnected from each other and can be clunky to work with on the command line.
Thu, Aug 17, 2023Performance Mystery: Is Golang's Startup Time Slow?
We at Replit pride ourselves on a snappy user experience. When I noticed our Universal Package Manager taking a slow ~200 ms to do even the most trivial operations, I took a look. Some context: Universal Package Manager, or UPM, is a package manager that works for a number of Replit-supported programming languages. It allows the Replit infrastructure to work with the same API, regardless of the language for the packaging aspect of the system. One important feature it offers is package guessing: the ability to look at your source files and figure out what packages you need automatically. However, since the package guessing operation has to happen when you click the Run button, it ever so slightly slows down the running of your code. I discovered that generally, regardless of which UPM operation was executed, it took at least ~200 ms for it to do the work. Given that UPM is written in Go — a language with a reputation for being fast — this was surprising.
Tue, Aug 15, 2023New Workspace Features to Keep Your API Keys Safe
As the community using Replit continues to grow, we want to help all users follow best practices and store API keys and secrets securely, rather than directly in code. Our Secrets feature, available in every Repl, allows you to store API keys securely where other users running or forking your Repl can’t access them. Now, we’re introducing new Workspace features to proactively help you protect your API keys and secrets. When Replit detects that you’re attempting to paste a likely secret value, like an API key or token, into a file, our Secret Scanner will warn you and give you the option to store that value as a Secret instead. The scanner runs behind the scenes and is completely client-side. You won’t know it’s there unless a potential secret value is encountered. How it works The Secret Scanner uses a list of known API key patterns and regexes to identify a likely secret value and warn you. Within the Secrets feature, data is encrypted with AES-256 at rest, and encryption keys are stored in a secure location that is protected by multiple layers of security. To help protect against key compromise, encryption keys are rotated regularly. Only you and your invited collaborators can see Secret values in a Repl.
Thu, Aug 10, 2023Improving the Inline Ghostwriter Experience
We’ve recently improved Ghostwriter’s inline actions, Explain Code, Generate Code, and Edit Code (formerly known as Transform Code), to make your coding sessions even more efficient. Here’s a summary of the key updates. Widgets: say goodbye to popovers! Previously, Ghostwriter used popovers to generate, explain, and edit code. While this served us well initially, it sometimes disrupted the flow of coding, and the popovers could be lost when you clicked outside of or moved around the code. It was also difficult to view and compare changes suggested by the AI if long paragraphs of code were generated.
Mon, Aug 7, 2023Expand possibilities on Replit with Expandable Storage
We're excited to roll out Expandable Storage, Replit's new storage infrastructure making the 1 GiB per-Repl restrictions a thing of the past. A couple weeks ago, we announced the next generation of storage that will allow Repls to reach 256 GiB. This change also included higher account-wide storage limits for everyone: Free plan gets 10 GiB Hacker plan gets 20 GiB
Sun, Aug 6, 2023Why We Changed Our Resource Limits and Plans
Replit gives users a computer in the cloud so they can code from any device. Our plan from the start has been to be the best place for anyone in the world to bring their idea to life. This is a hugely ambitious goal, one that required nearly a decade of building to realize. Here is our pre-seed pitch deck from 2015 laying out our “master plan”: Replit evolved hand-in-hand with the increasing demand for more sophisticated tools from our user base. What started as a tool primarily for learning, then for prototyping and sharing, is now a place where people are building real businesses that depend on Replit being fast, powerful, and reliable.
Thu, Aug 3, 2023Fewer Restarts and Faster Networking for All
Stay connected A few months ago, we shared that we upgraded some of the virtual machines (VMs) that back Repls. This meant that Hacker, Pro, and Teams users were 10x less likely to have to reconnect and lose the running state of their program because the backing container restarted. We know that the reconnect can be painful and interrupt your state of flow.