Tue, Mar 13, 2018Repl.it: the IDE That Grows—from Playgrounds to Fullstack Apps
At Repl.it we come to work every day to explore a single idea—what if programming just worked? What if instead of fiddling around with packages, configurations, and mismatching versions, you just open your IDE and start coding. What if developers can go from an idea to coding and shipping software with no time in between. What if teachers who want to teach programming don't have to also work as IT administrators. What if students can just code their homework without having to set up the development environment on every computer they wanted to code on. There exists an inverse relationship between developer tool sophistication and the getting started step. In other words, the more sophisticated our tools are, the harder it is to set up. Some would go as far as to say that programming is getting harder to learn. Given that progress in programming and developer tools will continue we have to actively fight back against the ever-increasing complexity of setting up the dev environment. Online coding playgrounds solve part of the problem by getting people to code as soon as possible. They're pre-setup environments that make a lot of decisions for you. They make it easy to get started, to learn to code, and maybe even prototype simple apps. However, up until now, they lacked universality which is key to computing. In other words, you can only use one language, maybe a few frameworks but you're often limited by what you can do. Today, we're changing this. We want the best of both worlds, an IDE that starts out looking like a playground but can grow with you as soon as you require the extra power. Here is how the IDE can grow from a simple Read-Eval-Print-Loop to a full-stack application development environment: Repl.it will always start out as a simple REPL, with a single file editor and a console. You hit run, a new environment is created, your editor script is evaluated, and then you can interact with the result in the console. If you want to use files, write to files, split your code into modules, etc., you just do that and behinds the scenes the environment will switch to one where you're interacting with the filesystem. Your code will start to compile and run as you'd expect it when you run a project.
- Mon, Mar 12, 2018
Live Server Development and Deployment (Beta)
Repl.it is becoming the platform where developers come to learn and build. With web hosting we also made it possible to host websites and since then we've seen an explosion of websites hosted on Repl.it. Today we're going further by making it possible to deploy servers on Repl.it. Just open a port, run your code, and that's it, it's deployed! For our 90s website competition I built this socket.io-based chat hosted on Repl.it: 90s-chat--amasad.repl.co Here is the repl for it:
- Thu, Mar 8, 2018
Require Ruby Gems
On the heels of our Node.js npm support announcement, we're pleased to announce that we now support Ruby Gems too. We're excited to have the Ruby community join the fun. The way it works is slightly different from our Node or Python implementations. In Node or Python you simple require/import the module you'd like to use, and we'll automagically install the package for you. In Ruby, unfortunately, we couldn't find a reliable way to map requires to Gems so we had to go with a neat feature of Bundler: bundler/inline where you can define your gemspec in the code. This works well for Repl.it because we'd like to make it easy for people to use the repl without having to add files. Here is an example, this uses the gem colorlize to print an ascii drawing of the American flag: We're still working on improving this, look forward to the following the coming days: Per repl caching: install once, there forever
- Wed, Mar 7, 2018
Introducing Node.js package support
Ever since we introduced third-party package support for Python we've seen an explosion of exciting programs on Repl.it. Everything from games to machine-learning applications that just weren't possible before. Today we're happy to announce that we're expanding this to support Node.js. Just require your dependencies and we'll handle the rest for you. Here is a working repl that gets my Github stats. It uses request to fetch the data and underscore to filter the relevant stats. This is an early (open beta) release so please let us know if you hit any bugs or issues. We're currently working on the following: package.json support: if you have a package.json in your project we'll use that instead of parsing the requires. This will likely come in the next couple of days. Caching: if you install a package on a repl it will be cached forever.
- Mon, Feb 26, 2018
New and improved repls page
People use Repl.it in a variety of ways; some use it for building and shipping applications, while others use it for working on homework, and many others use it as a quick prototyping/experimentation tool. Supporting all these use cases (and more) is something we care a lot about, but up until now there wasn't an easy way to, for example, quickly go back to a project that you continue to work on every day. Today we're excited to announce some of the changes that we've been testing for the past couple of weeks. Going to "my repls" the first thing you'll notice is a big "Continue coding" section with the projects that we think you might want to go back and work on. Starring Additionally, you can now star repls, so it's easy to go back to them!
- Wed, Feb 14, 2018
Modular, fast, small: how we built a server-rendered IDE
At Repl.it our mission is to make programming more accessible, which means our coding environment needs to be lightweight, load fast, and work from anywhere in the world. However, as with so many software projects that evolve with time, we accumulated some bloat (luckily, we haven't included a mail client yet) and quite a few ad-hoc hacks to glue everything together. In this post, we'll go over how we designed our new IDE to have a small core (everything is a plugin), to be easily customizable (even on the fly), and to server-render. The old IDE React encourages you to layout and compose your components as they appear on the page. Our workspace started out looking something like this: But this lacks configurability. For every language, we have a slightly different configuration. Some have tabs, console, a web viewer, or language-specific components like python turtle. Additionally, every language has a different engine powering it with its own interface and set of capabilities. All this configuration logic used to get crammed into the top-level component with ever-increasing branching logic. Furthermore, runtime configuration must be explicitly written for every language. Modifying the layout for one language leads to more hardcoded logic and components and single-use components. This, in turn, caused making changes to one component a game of updating and testing every possible parent. Rewrite
- Mon, Jan 22, 2018
Your websites hosted on Repl.it
People in our community build awesome games, apps, and websites on Repl.it's web programming environment, but until now they didn't have any easy way of sharing these creations with other people. But today we're fixing this: every web program you write we will automatically host for you under a subdomain with your name. You're then free to share the website, make it your homepage, submit it as homework, or even build it as your startup company. Here is a quick video of how it works. Notice how fast you can go from a project to a hosted website: Static site hosting is only the start. Pretty soon you'll be able to host all sorts of apps and servers on Repl.it.
- Sun, Nov 12, 2017
New in Repls: autosave, custom urls, and more
We are always excited about launching new features and sharing with you, our dear users, what we’ve been up to. For the past few months, Amjad, Mason and I have been working hard and last night we quietly launched the new repl features. These features required a lot of infrastructure and data changes which is always tricky to execute. We ran into some technical difficulties last night with the data migration but was able to bring the site back up and things have been running relatively smoothly since then. However, since radical changes were required to get this out we’re still working through some of the issues. If you see a bug or if you have a repl that’s not working please let us know and we’ll fix it. We hope we have your support as we work through the issues. One thing we can promise you is that this change will unlock so many amazing features and long-term stability and reliability starting today. Note that the classroom product is not affected by this at all. This is only a “repls” product change. Now on to the new features 🥁🥁 Autosave When we promise we deliver. As of last night your code is autosaved by default. The new interface will include only two buttons: the run and the share button. You don’t need to worry about saving your code anymore, we’ll do it for you, so no code is lost, all your work is saved in (my repls) .
- Thu, Sep 7, 2017
A Few Updates in the Workspace
We strive to make the workspace as useful as possible while keeping it intuitive and approachable. We get a crazy number of requests for features every day, not to mention our own ideas. It becomes a challenging balance between feature creep and simplicity. Lately we've added a few of these features that we hope you'll find useful and, if not, you won't even notice they're there. Formatting in Javascript Javascript is the first language where we've introduced an automatic formatter. If you click the icon we'll run your code through prettier which reprints your code in a consistent style. We've already been using prettier internally since it first came out in and it has been a huge win. We'll be rolling out formatters for other languages in the future. Uploading Files
- Tue, Jul 4, 2017
Your Repl.it Profile
We're constantly surprised and delighted by the creativity of people in our community. Whether it be games, animations, utilities, or simply snippets to answer Stackoverflow questions -- it's always fascinating to see! However, we haven't done a good job giving credits to authors for their creations. We're changing this in two ways: We're giving you, dear Repl.it user, your own user profile. Your repls will have your picture and name on the top left hand section above the editor. User profiles Right now, you can go to your account and start crafting your user profile. You can change your profile picture (it defaults to your Gravatar if you have one), add a bio (complete with links to your website or social media accounts), and if you want, even add a school, company, organization or whatever institution you belong to.
- Thu, Jun 1, 2017
One more console
Debugging web projects on Repl.it can be frustrating. Until today, there was no easy way to view your errors and console logs (unless you open your browsers' developer tools). But that's changing because we're introducing our new tabbed console view for environments that has graphics output (like Web and Python Turtle). See it in action:
- Mon, May 29, 2017
Check out my Repl!
The label "sessions" is very near and dear to my heart. I vividly remember how Amjad came up with the name and why. After we learned that people would like to create accounts on Repl.it, we were trying to figure out what was the main value proposition for creating an account. Of course, it was saving code! But what do you call a list of code projects saved on your account? In a brainstorming session in the New York City subway (incidentally, on our way to an improv class so naturally we were yes-anding each-other) Amjad suggested the name "sessions"! He continued "this will be a feed of sesssions that you create and manage". But let's be honest "sessions" is kind of boring and somewhat bland. So if Repl-it is about Repl-ing, what is the thing that you save? It's of course a Repl! In fact, some of our users already call it that: "I made a repl". So going forward we're going to use "Repl" instead of "Session". When you log in you'll see that the "sessions" list is now a "Repls" list. And an individual "session" is a "Repl". Not much else will change. But you'll be happy to know that we're designing a place where you can showcase your Repls and share them with the rest of our community. Happy Repling!!
- Wed, May 17, 2017
Introducing Kotlin REPL
On the heels of Google announcing native Kotlin support on Android yesterday, we thought it'd be cool to get a Kotlin REPL up so that people can try it. Give it a spin here. It's still in beta so let us know if you hit any bugs.
- Tue, Mar 28, 2017
Require any npm package
Last year we introduced support for importing any Python package from PyPi and -- although we don't have perfect support for all packages -- it turned out to be a very popular feature. That's why today we're excited to continue the roll-out for the rest of our platform starting with web-based languages. [](preview end) Whether you're using plain old JavaScript REPL, HTML/CSS/JS, or ES2016, you'll be able to import any package from npm (that can run in the browser). How it works is that we parse out the requires from your code, fetch the bundle from npm via wzrd.in, and evaluate the bundle in the same context as your code. Note that ES6 imports is not currently supported but we're hoping to get it in soon.
- Thu, Mar 2, 2017
Start Coding with Clojure on Replit
Earlier this week we introduced Haskell support. And now, as promised, we're continuing to add more functional languages. So today we're excited to introduce Clojure. A Lisp dialect that runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine with a focus on immutability. [](preview end) You can give it a try right now at repl.it/languages/clojure. And as always here's a gif of what you can expect: This is built on top of the Clojure's NRepl server so you should be able to get the native behavior you expect from a Clojure REPL. Please let us know if we can make it better.