Sun, Nov 21, 2021How to Set Up Your Own Mastodon Instance with Replit
With many development tools and even whole development environments moving to the cloud, Replit is at the forefront of this change. Replit is one of the leading cloud, in-browser IDEs with support for fifty-plus programming languages with syntax highlighting and intelligent autocompletion. However, Replit is more than just an IDE in a cloud. With additional features like real-time collaboration, GitHub integration, and detailed edit history, Replit is a full-blown workspace for teams, educators, and interviewers. This guide will show you how to install Mastodon in the Replit environment, showing its versatility and potential.You can follow along with this Repl. What Is Mastodon? Before we start, let me introduce you to Mastodon: an open-source social networking software.
Thu, Nov 11, 2021Announcing File Persistence in Hosted Apps for Hackers
We mostly think of repls as being full computers in the cloud, and one of the goals of the platform team at Replit is to enable people to build almost anything in replspace. In the past, when a file was stored in a repl, it would only be saved when the editor was opened. This went against our goal and made it impossible to write certain servers that changed files at runtime. This was especially hard for newcomers, because that's the easiest way to persist information. Starting today, Hacker and Teams subscribers will be able to write services that accept file uploads or store data in a local database (think SQLite) or text file, regardless of how the repl was started. A demo of what it looks like for a server to be able to save its files: https://sqlite.luisreplit.repl.co What is replspace? replspace is a term we coined up. In operating systems, memory is divided into kernel space and user space. Kernel space is where the kernel executes and provides its services. The kernel can access all of the memory, but the user cannot access the kernel's memory directly. By contrast, user space is all the memory that a user can access without modifying the kernel sources (or creating a kernel module). The term user space has also been used to refer to the programs that are run by users. This memory separation is important because the kernel manages all hardware resources, providing access control and coordination, and provides abstractions that let programs that run in user space make requests to interact with those resources. The kernel has several interfaces so that the user space programs can communicate with the kernel, the most important one being the system call interface. These use the abstractions laid out by the kernel to ensure that users and programs don't interfere with each other and also iron out differences in the underlying hardware and provide a uniform "view" of the resources available to the machine.
Wed, Oct 27, 2021Replit Art Gallery: An introduction to Replit's Illustrator - Joe Baker
Who makes Replit art? Hi! Thats me! My name is Joe and I’m Replit’s illustrator. I have been making art/graphics/multi media for the last 10 years. I studied Visual Media and excelled in experimental artwork. I draw for fun almost daily and I can’t stop thinking about aesthetics and concepts. It started with colouring in books when I was a kid I went from there basically. I have a huge love for making and appreciating art. I’m specifically drawn to art that rocks you to your core! Anything with wild colours, strange or abstract concepts, stuff that makes you feel something. My major influences come from surrealist art, psychedelic comics from the 70’s, 90’s cartoons, pop art, large scale public installations (sculpture and murals) and any festival artwork! My work is a fusion of these influences and I’m so lucky that I now get to create art for Replit on a full time basis.
Mon, Oct 25, 2021Design Systems @ Replit: Better Tokens
Part 1 of a series about our evolving design system, RUI (Replit User Interface). Replit is growing fast, as an application and a team. New features are being added, new people are joining the platform, and new designers and engineers are building it all. Unfortunately, this means that different parts of the product start to look and behave differently, because no single designer or engineer can keep all the interface states in their head. With dozens of people working on Replit, what happens when you want to update your color or text scheme across the whole site? What if you want users to be familiar with how components work anywhere they see them? It doesn't happen by accident — it requires strong infrastructural basics that you can rely on. So, we spent a few months this year building a stronger foundation for our design system. This is how our system is structured now:
Sun, Oct 24, 2021Betting on Nix: donating $25K to the NixOS Foundation
As building software grows more like snapping Legos together, how people find and use those Legos becomes more important. That's why we are donating $25,000 to the NixOS Foundation and betting on Nix as the future of software distribution. In software, the Lego pieces are called packages. A package may be some code your program needs to call (a library) or another program your code needs to run. Historically, people have used package managers to find and install packages into their projects. Each language ecosystem has its own package manager. Replit built and open-sourced the Universal Package Manager to unify this fragmented landscape. Package managers are a holdover from the old model of programming, when development environments lived on personal computers. Now that development environments (ahem, repls) can run entirely in the cloud, fetching packages from a central server, unzipping them, and installing them into a filesystem seems shockingly archaic. The future is instant. When you press the run button in a repl, your code should run immediately, not pause to fetch packages. The Nix project unlocks instant repl runs. Nix uses content-addressable storage for its packages. If you know which package you want to use, you can compute its location on the filesystem without having to search a central repository. Which means we can put every single package on a fast disk in the cloud and skip the fetch-unzip-install cycle. When you press run, your program can instantly access all the packages it needs on a drive already mounted into the repl. The future is reproducible. What does that mean? If your repl works today, it should also work the next time you go to run it.
Wed, Oct 13, 2021Solidity on Replit: Diving into Web3
Today, we're announcing our official Solidity development template. Solidity is the language used to create smart contracts, which are programs that run on the Ethereum blockchain. This is important for the Web3 commmunity because there's finally an accessible and collaborative way to learn Solidity, which will unlock thousands of new developers in the decentralized web. You can try it out by creating a new Repl and typing solidity in the search bar. Or, go directly to the template page to fork it or leave feedback. :) Why this matters Lowering barriers to entry is core to Replit. Everything we do is intended to make software creation easier, faster, and more fun. So when new infrastructure and communities (like Ethereum) gain momentum, it's our responsibility to help people create for that new technological universe. So, why not try to build the best blockchain development experience in the world? Replit has a unique advantage here. Among other "web-based IDEs", Replit is a true general purpose computing environment. Every Repl you create is actually a Linux container, meaning everything we build sits on top of a fully functioning operating system. This gives us the flexibility to build basically anything we want. Almost any program or environment you can create locally, we can transform into a URL.
Tue, Oct 12, 2021Faster Nix Repl Startup
For the past few months we have been working on improving our Nix integration. Nix allows users to easily use over 80,000 Linux packages in a repl. Nix opens the door to many exciting tools and applications on the platform. Our goal is for every repl to be backed by Nix. Before we can do that, we need to ensure that the Nix experience is just as good, if not better, than our existing Polygott solution. If you've used a Nix repl, you may have noticed additional loading time when opening your repl. The console would show "Loading Nix environment..." and you'd have to wait for a few seconds. In some cases, you might have waited for tens of seconds. We care about making repls start up as fast as possible and this additional loading time wasn't acceptable. Through some additional caching, we have entirely removed this loading time on many Nix repls. Now, Nix repls will start up just as fast as Polygott-based repls. See below for a before and after demonstration. Before: After:
Mon, Oct 4, 2021Enter the Shadows with Dark Mode
Looking for how to change your Replit theme? Click here. It's spooky season, so we have a spooky feature for you: Dark Mode™ is now available for everyone on Replit! Just open your sidebar and click the moon to enter the shadow realm. Click the sun to switch back. Dark theme will work across the app — from the homepage,
Mon, Sep 27, 2021Replit + Codex - Beta Release
Update: To stay up to date on Replit and AI, check out our Ghostwriter Beta & AI mode announcement. In it we discuss how we infused state-of-the-art intelligence into nearly all IDE features as well as the future of AI on Replit. At Replit, one of our fundamental goals is to make programming easier. When we got a first glimpse at OpenAI's new Codex model, our instinct was to think of how it could help people understand programs better—especially beginners. We've tested ideas before that used OpenAI's more general model, GPT-3, to ask questions about code. Amjad wrote about some of these explorations on our blog last year.
Mon, Sep 20, 2021A New Code Editor for Mobile - CodeMirror 6
Today, we are thrilled to announce CodeMirror as the new code editor on Replit for mobile devices. CodeMirror is a versatile code editor that has been specifically designed with mobile in mind, providing an excellent touchscreen experience. This change is the beginning of a focused effort on mobile development here at Replit; the editor is just the first step! The editor supports all the features you expect from a code editor, and we're working on making it even more powerful. We hope this update will be helpful for those of you who do not have access to a computer but still want to learn and create cool things. We are also working on bringing CodeMirror to the desktop to provide a consistent experience no matter what device you or your multiplayer partners are on. We will see many of the features that we currently have only on the desktop ported to mobile in the process. Keep an eye out for threads, debugger, and more on mobile. Watch this blog for a follow-up technical post on our experience with the editors of the web: Monaco, Ace, and CodeMirror. We've got a lot planned for mobile, we are so excited, and we hope you are too!
Fri, Sep 10, 2021Data Loss: a sad tale with a happy ending
Earlier this year, we discovered that we were losing data for some of our users. This manifested as either repls being completely empty after reloading, or some of the changes to files not being present after reloading. Obviously losing data is the worst we can do, so we had to fix this immediately. This blog post narrates the adventure of how we discovered this, how we fixed it, and the lessons we learned during the way. The discovery Throughout the year, we had had some worries about some theoretical cases in which users could lose data. We have had a few complaints from people that their code wasn't correctly saved, and since we weren't sure what caused them, we just tried to fix bugs here and there one at a time in an unstructured fashion. Around mid-July, we got an alarmingly large number of reports of people about their code not saving correctly in a short amount of time, ironically just after deploying one such fix. This meant two things: our intuition about folks losing data was correct, but the way we were fixing it was not! This led to the immediate discovery that there were months- or years-old bugs that were silently losing or corrupting data, and some of them turned out to be load-bearing bugs that couldn't be fixed in isolation (since fixing them triggered other kinds of data loss). This made us start a much larger project to have better guarantees and incrementally fix things without regressions. Homer Simpson doing a dramatic impression of this whole situation
Wed, Sep 8, 2021New Kaboom Workspace
We made a better kaboom workspace on replit.
- Wed, Sep 1, 2021
Making Replit Faster for Everyone
Replit's mission is to make programming accessible and provide computer superpowers. To achieve that goal, repls need to be fast. To that end we've been working on a number of improvements in our infrastructure and code to unlock faster repls. We constantly analyze the speed of our clusters and identify areas of improvement. Here are a few examples. Editing Code Just Got Faster We split repls woken up by hosting (repl.co, custom domains) to different VMs than repls that you access in the workspace. This makes editing code and interacting with your repl in the workspace faster by ensuring your usage isn't competing with nearly as many other repls. For repls being actively edited in the workspace, we've seen an average 10-20% improvement in speed from this change. This applies across all subscription types including free users. More CPU For Your Repl
Mon, Aug 23, 2021Replit Joins Google for Education Integrated Solutions Initiative
New Replit features, powered by Google Cloud, make it easier than ever for students to code. Replit is announcing it has joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program, utilizing Google Cloud as part of its core infrastructure to create accessible coding opportunities for computer science educators and learners around the world. As a participant of the Google for Education Integrated Solutions Initiative, Replit offers customers the ability to collaborate on code from anywhere, on any device. Students and teachers can easily build on Replit from a Chromebook, download it from the Google Play Store to their device, and even integrate Replit Teams for Education into Google Classroom. With the new Google Classroom integration, teachers can bring collaborative coding into their classroom faster than before. They can quickly add every student in their Google Classroom to a Team, easily add Replit projects as Google Classroom assignments, and access time-saving features like autograding tools and an integrated gradebook. As one Replit teacher put it, “I can concentrate on giving more time to working with the children and helping them rather than on housekeeping stuff.” These tools allow educators to focus on the important things, and Replit has those values covered, too. First, Schools and parents can rest assured that their students’ privacy is protected. With the security of Google Cloud infrastructure and FERPA/COPPA compliance built into the product, students can participate freely within a Replit Team for Education. Additionally, Replit has an app in the Google Play Store and will be featured in the Chromebook App Hub, making it easy for students on any device to get started coding. A Replit Teams for Education user, Shane McReavey, shared that “not everyone has the funds to purchase a laptop, so to create that sense of equality, that everyone has an opportunity, that’s where Replit has been really beneficial.” Another member of our teacher community recently shared that “Coding online is the best option for students especially if there is another lockdown. Many of them only have Chromebooks at home.” When so many students are still learning from their computers and tablets at home and numerous schools have opted to distribute Chromebooks to their students, this makes an enormous difference.
- Thu, Aug 5, 2021
Replit²
Replit has many use cases and features, but one that's less talked about is its ability to serve as a secure compute environment for specialized apps. What if you want to build some tool that will generate code, then execute it for your users? Or maybe you are building a specialized online IDE that injects code for users, then executes the bundle? With Replit, you can start building those kinds of applications quickly without having to focus on building a fast and secure backend. Build the frontend, we'll provide the compute power. That's a great promise, but it's not one that is fully documented. Well, now that is a thing of the past! Let's explore how Replit can serve as your compute backend by building a very basic Replit clone. UPDATE 2021-08-16: Please check the section on Security at the end of this post, more details were added and the post was clarified thanks to the help of @AmazingMech2418. Building a compute node A compute node is a single unit (usually a single server, VM, container, or application) of computing power than can execute work. In our case, a compute node will be a single Repl that can execute arbitrary code using an API. We'll be using the Koa.js framework and python in this post. Let's start by creating a new Nix repl. Why Nix in particular? Nix allows us to install any package that can be found on the official Nix package registry. This give us the ability to install any language interpreter or binary we want, provided said language is able to execute arbitrary code. With minimal work, we'll be able to implement multiple languages in our compute backend and execute them through our API.