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.
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
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, Jun 5, 2023Replit AI Manifesto
Amjad Masad, CEO: I'm excited to welcome Michele Catasta to the Replit team as our VP of AI. Michele joins us from Google, where he was Head of Applied Research at Google Labs and, before that, Google X, where he researched Large Language Models applied to code. Michele has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and was Research Scientist and Instructor in AI at Stanford University. This manifesto is a culmination of a conversation Michele and I have had for over a year on the future of AI and its impact on the software industry: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” [1982] More than 40 years later, Alan Kay’s quote still sounds as relevant as it gets – no wonder he is recognized as one of the most influential pioneers of our industry. As a matter of fact, over the past few decades software and hardware worked in conjunction to dramatically augment human intelligence. Steve Jobs celebrated Alan’s quote in his famous 2007 keynote, right after launching the very first iPhone – possibly one of Steve’s mottos, considering how Apple built its reputation and massive success story on unprecedented software/hardware integration. At Replit, our mission is to empower the next billion software creators. Our users build software collaboratively with the power of AI, on any device, without spending a second on setup. We accomplished that by creating from the ground up a delightful developer experience. The Replit development environment allows our users to focus solely on writing software, while most of the hardware (and Cloud computing) complexities are carefully hidden away.
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.
Thu, Mar 23, 2023Building Ghostwriter Chat
Why did we build it? At Replit, we want to give people the most powerful programming environment, and what better way is there than giving people access to a pair programmer directly in their IDE? Enter Ghostwriter Chat. Gone are the days where you had to search Stack Overflow for an obscure error message or visit the docs of your favorite package for the millionth time because you forgot what that one argument was called. Interacting with Ghostwriter should be as easy as interacting with a team member, and it is. Since Ghostwriter Chat can have access to your repl file and context, Ghostwriter can help answer questions about your program without copying and pasting entire code blocks. We started working on Ghostwriter Chat during our Hackweek in January, and we wanted to be the first to market with an LLM chat application native to your editor. From start to finish, we shipped the product in ~6-8 weeks
Wed, Mar 22, 2023Announcing Outbound Data Transfer Limits
Beginning April 7th, Replit will begin enforcing limits on the amount of outbound data that developers can transmit from their Repls to users and external services. Inbound data transfer is free. You can see how much outbound data transfer you've used on your account page. The meter resets at UTC midnight at the start of every month, and the base limit depends on your plan. Free tier developers will receive 10 GiB, Hacker developers 50 GiB, and Pro developers 100 GiB. These plan limits are captured on our pricing page. You may purchase additional outbound data transfer using Cycles or another payment method at $0.10/GiB. You will receive an email and on-plaform notification when you are approaching and when you have reached your limit so you can take action and keep your Repls running.
Sun, Mar 19, 2023An update to cover pages
We're excited to announce that Replit rolled out a big visual update to cover pages last week. With this update, Repl content comes first more than ever before. Everything else is now off to the side, allowing for a cleaner and more focused app experience. Our goal with this update is to improve the user experience for both creators and visitors of Replit projects. Two key improvements come with this update:
- Tue, Feb 14, 2023
Announcing Ghostwriter Chat: The first conversational AI programmer
Today, we are announcing the beta release of Ghostwriter Chat. Now with chat, a proactive debugger, and awareness of your project’s context, Ghostwriter becomes the best AI pair programmer in the world. Building Ghostwriter Last fall, we introduced Ghostwriter, Replit’s coding AI, with Complete, Generate, Transform, and Explain Code - coding assistant tools that work with you as you code. Together they made coding faster by automating repetitive tasks and removing the drudgery of writing boilerplate code. That was just the first step towards our master plan to create a fully autonomous pair programmer – one that feels like working with another teammate.
Sun, Jan 29, 2023Git in the Shell
Starting today, the Git command-line tools of all Repls provide a much better experience and integrate with your GitHub account. If you connect your GitHub account to Replit from the Account page, your Git commands (like git clone, git fetch, git push) will have access to your GitHub repositories: You're now able compose Git commit messages in the editor:
Mon, Jan 23, 2023PostgreSQL Database Preview Now Available On Replit
Databases and web apps go together like peanut butter and jelly. In a word, they're inseparable. And despite all the amazing innovations in NoSQL data stores, often a good old relational database is the most reliable tool for the job. We want to make it completely seamless to develop applications that need databases on Replit. Starting today, you can create and instantly begin to use PostgreSQL databases from within the Replit workspace. Here's how you use it. First, click the PostgreSQL icon in the Tools pane on the lower left hand side of the workspace.