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.
Mon, Jul 31, 2023Rebuilding the Replit Filetree for Superior Performance and Accessibility
We recently rebuilt the Replit filetree with a focus on performance and accessibility. The result? Quicker interactions when exploring large projects and a more accessible experience with improvements like keyboard navigation. Here’s a summary of how the new filetree works. In the early days of Replit, it served as a simple but powerful editor and console. As our user base grew and their projects became more complex, we understood the need for a filesystem and, consequently, a filetree. This filetree worked for small projects but started to have some performance issues as projects grew in size. This was particularly noticeable once we started using Replit to build Replit – our web repo had around 8000 files. We decided to revamp the filetree, and today, we’re excited to share the improvements we’ve made, focusing on performance and accessibility. Reimagining the filetree: prioritizing performance
Sun, Jul 30, 2023Replit Deployments: 3x Faster and Even More Features
In April, we released Replit Deployments, the fastest way to go from software idea to production. We rebuilt our application hosting infrastructure for production-grade applications thanks to your feedback. In this post, we’ll highlight upgrades, bug fixes, and improvements to Deployments since initial release in April. Replit Deployments > Always On Replit Deployments is a better and more reliable than our previous hosting option, Always On: Your app is hosted on Google Cloud VMs making it more reliable and stable. Isolated VM resources for your app will give you improved security and performance. Control when you release to users so you can fix your app without breaking production.
Wed, Jul 19, 2023Replit Storage: The Next Generation
Repls today allow 256+ GiB of storage space, up from a historical 1GiB limit. This post is about the infrastructure that enabled that change. Historically Replit limited files in each Repl to 1 GiB of storage space. The 1 GiB limit was enough for small projects, but with the advent of AI model development and with some projects needing gigabytes worth of dependencies to be installed, 1 GiB is not enough. We announced on Developer Day that we were rolling out the infrastructure to unlock much larger Repls, and this is the first part of that. Read on to see why that limit existed in the first place, what changed, and how we pulled it off.
Thu, Jul 13, 2023State of AI Development: 34x growth in AI projects, OpenAI's dominance, the rise of open-source, and more
With the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs), for the first time, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) became accessible to everyday developers. Apps that feel magical, even software that was practically impossible to build by big technology companies with billions in R&D spend, suddenly became not only possibly, but a joy to build and share. The surge in building with AI started in 2021, grew rapidly in 2022, and exploded in the first half of 2023. The speed of development has increased with more LLM providers (e.g., Google, OpenAI, Cohere, Anthropic) and developer tools (e.g., ChromaDB, LangChain). In parallel, natural language interfaces to generate code have made building accessible to more people than ever. Throughout this boom Replit has grown to become the central platform for AI development. Tools like ChatGPT can generate code, but creators still need infrastructure to run it. On Replit, you can create a development environment (Repl) in seconds in any language or framework which comes with an active Linux container on Google Cloud, an editor complete with the necessary tools to start building, including a customizable Workspace, extensions, and Ghostwriter: an AI pair programmer that has project context and can actively help developers debug. Deployments allowed developers to ship their apps in secure and scalable cloud environments. Given our central role in the AI wave, we wanted to share some stats with the community on the state of AI development. Building with AI Since Q4 of 2022, we have seen an explosion in AI projects. At the end of Q2 ‘23, there were almost 300,000 distinct projects that were AI related. By contrast, a search of GitHub shows only ~33k OpenAI repositories over the same time period.
Thu, Jun 29, 2023Empowering Educators with MagicSchool and Replit Deployments
Replit is where builders come to bring their software and app ideas to life, fast. We’re showcasing builders and the software they created and deployed on Replit. If you interested in being showcased, click the button below.
Sat, Jun 24, 2023The Journey To Code Search
Finding that one comment, class, or function in your codebase is important. You might not always know where to look... which is why we created a brand new Code Search tool! From simple queries to regular expressions it has never been easier to get work done on Replit. The new Code Search tool supports queries with word filters, regular expressions, include patterns, exclude patterns, as well as replacements (with regular expression capture group support) so that you can find what you need and make refactors on larger codebases quickly and efficiently. Try it out now on Replit! But don't forget to come back to this post so we can bring you on our Journey to Code Search. How It All Started
Sat, Jun 24, 2023Internship Experience At Replit
Hey! I'm Nathan. It's been a short but exciting few months at Replit, and I wanted to share my experience with you all. The Journey Begins I started programming back in 2018. Since then, I’ve met fantastic people, learned new stuff, and made a lot of wacky projects. What I did not expect was a technical recruiter to reach out to me through Twitter.
- Mon, Jun 12, 2023
June 6, 2023, Single-Sign-On Security Vulnerability
Earlier today, we emailed users about a security vulnerability affecting parts of our single-sign-on functionality. While we’ve fixed the vulnerability and have found no evidence of any exploit, we are publishing this post out of transparency. On Tuesday, June 6, while auditing our authentication systems, we investigated a possible vulnerability related to our single-sign-on functionality. We patched the vulnerability the same day and proceeded to investigate whether any users could’ve been affected by it. On Thursday, June 8, we identified a subset of users who had previously used our single-sign-on functionality and were potentially exposed to this vulnerability. In particular, if the email address on record for a user’s Replit account was not already tied to a GitHub account, an attacker could have created a GitHub account by re-using the email address on record for the user’s Replit account. Under certain conditions, it would have been possible to use that fraudulent GitHub account to impersonate the affected user on Replit. While we have no evidence that a third party logged into any Replit account this way, out of caution, we have logged out of all Replit sessions all users who we could identify as potentially fitting these criteria. Additionally, out of an abundance of caution, we have logged out all users who have ever used our single-sign-on functionality with a GitHub, Facebook, or Apple account. We take the security of our users' accounts seriously. We continuously perform security audits and, when we discover issues, we proactively address them and harden related systems. In the coming months, we will continue to make substantial improvements to our authentication systems to make them more secure and user-friendly. If you are experiencing trouble logging back into your account or have additional questions, please reach out to support.