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.
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
Mon, Jun 12, 2023June 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.
Mon, May 29, 2023Configurable Keybindings for the Workspace
We recently launched customizable keyboard shortcuts to supercharge the workspace for every Replit user. This makes Replit more powerful for everyone, from beginners to experts, by unlocking the ability to perform more actions in the workspace without leaving your keyboard. Defining all the actions available to a user in a keybindings system also increases the discoverability of lesser-known features. Finally, the increased customization handles the challenge of building for many types of users working in different environments. How keybindings work To see all the keybindings available to you, you can head to the Settings tab in the workspace. Your keybinding settings follow you across Repls, browsers, and devices with no work required. Search for a keybinding by name, description, or simply the keybinding itself by pressing the “Record” button to the right of the search bar. Changes to your shortcuts are saved instantly, and the UI updates accordingly to handle your new keybinding settings.
Thu, May 25, 2023Super Colliding Nix Stores: Nix Flakes for Millions of Developers
We’ve teamed up with Obsidian Systems and Tweag to enable Nix to merge multiple (possibly-remote) Nix stores, bringing Nix Flakes and development environment portability to millions of Replit users. Nix is an open-source cross-platform package manager and build tool that lets you access the most up-to-date and complete repository of software packages in the world. Nix’s approach to package building ensures that software and development environments will always work the same way, no matter where it is deployed. Replit has bet big on Nix because we believe in a future where developers are free from the drudgery of setting up their development and production environments. A world where onboarding a co-worker is as simple as forking a Repl. When you use Nix to describe your environment, you don’t have to redo your setup everywhere you want your code to work. As Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of Hashicorp, said: one big benefit is that once you adopt Nix, you can get a consistent environment across development (on both Linux and Mac), CI, and production.
Sun, May 14, 2023Making Git Good
Improving Git on Replit There has been a new Git pane in Repls for a little while now. This new Git UI you see is a part of a complete rewrite of everything Git-related on Replit: both engineering and design. It is the start of our journey into more deeply integrating Git into Replit, with much more to come. Let's talk about it!
Mon, May 1, 2023Announcing Replit Extensions
At Developer Day, we revealed our commitment to increasing the extensibility of Replit to better serve the diverse needs of our community of makers and all developers. And today, we’re excited to announce a major milestone in our mission to empower a billion developers: the launch of Replit Extensions. Extending the Replit Environment Makers have an ever-present desire to have control over their tools. This is true in every creative domain, be it software, music, photography, or painting. What makes software unique is that much of the tooling is itself software, and with any mastery of software, you can begin to shape your tools to your needs. Making Replit extensible has been at the top of our minds since the beginning. We've been busy at work—we've iterated on our core primitives, our layout system, refactored our code towards modularity, allowed people to configure their Repls, and even replaced our code editor with one that's far more composable, with extensibility as one of the driving reasons.
Tue, Apr 18, 2023How to train your own Large Language Models
Learn how Replit trains Large Language Models (LLMs) using Databricks, Hugging Face, and MosaicML Introduction Large Language Models, like OpenAI's GPT-4 or Google's PaLM, have taken the world of artificial intelligence by storm. Yet most companies don't currently have the ability to train these models, and are completely reliant on only a handful of large tech firms as providers of the technology. At Replit, we've invested heavily in the infrastructure required to train our own Large Language Models from scratch. In this blog post, we'll provide an overview of how we train LLMs, from raw data to deployment in a user-facing production environment. We'll discuss the engineering challenges we face along the way, and how we leverage the vendors that we believe make up the modern LLM stack: Databricks, Hugging Face, and MosaicML. While our models are primarily intended for the use case of code generation, the techniques and lessons discussed are applicable to all types of LLMs, including general language models. We plan to dive deeper into the gritty details of our process in a series of blog posts over the coming weeks and months. Why train your own LLMs?
Tue, Apr 11, 2023Replit Deployments - the fastest way from idea → production
After a 5 year Hosting beta, we're ready to Deploy. Introducing Replit Deployments Today we’re releasing Replit Deployments, the fastest way to go from idea to production in any language. It’s a ground up rebuild of our application hosting infrastructure. Here’s a list of features we’re releasing today: Your hosted VM will rarely restart, keeping your app running and stable. You’re Always On by default. No need to run pingers or pay extra.
Wed, Apr 5, 2023Hackers, Pros, and Teams users can now code for hours without restarts
Stay Connected Starting today, all users on Hacker, Pro, or Teams plans will see a 10x reduction in container restarts while coding in the Workspace. Previously, you would experience a restart at least once an hour. Now you can code for multiple hours straight without restarts. Deep work can stay uninterrupted and you can keep programs running longer while you build. Repls are computers that live in the cloud. One of the most painful experiences with a cloud computer is losing your network link. Sometimes your network flakes out and things need to reconnect. But the worst version is when your Repl restarts. There are lots of reasons why this can happen. In the background, your container has stopped or died, and our infrastructure quickly starts up a new one to put you in. You can simulate this by typing kill 1 in the Shell.
- Mon, Apr 3, 2023
April 2 Potential GitHub Credentials Exposure
Yesterday, on April 2, 2023, Replit discovered a site vulnerability that may have exposed GitHub auth tokens for <0.01% of Replit users, stemming from use of the GitHub import feature. This could have permitted unauthorized read/write access to all the repositories of those users by default (users can choose to authorize just a subset of repositories). We have no indication that those exposed tokens were misused or used to exploit GitHub repositories. The vulnerability has been fixed, all existing GitHub auth tokens associated with the Replit app have been revoked, and access to the GitHub import feature has been restored. The number of exposed users was limited to <0.01% because there are two preconditions that needed to be met for a user’s Repl to be vulnerable: The Repl was created using the GitHub import feature; and One of: