Mon, Aug 29, 2022Welcoming Heroku Users to Replit
Last week, Heroku announced they are discontinuing their free hosting plan. We get it. Offering free hosting and compute is extremely challenging, but there are many creators globally that are unable to pay for resources. As a result, many Heroku users are moving over to Replit, and we're excited! At Replit, we believe anyone should be able to create software, and we will continue to create pathways for users to host their projects without swiping a credit card. Not only that, but we are taking it to new levels. Today, we host 1M concurrent containers and serve 10b+/month in dynamic content from apps deployed on Replit. At this scale, we are one of the largest compute providers in the world. But we're only getting started. In the coming months, we're going to radically change our hosting offering. Earlier this year, we set super ambitious goals: 10x performance and reliability 3x the nines of availability
Wed, Aug 10, 2022A Tale of Two Tabs
Today we're launching a long-awaited feature in the Workspace: Tabs! Yes, you can finally: Open two files side by side Open as many shells as you'd like Remove tools you don't need to use
Wed, Jul 27, 2022Get Replit Famous
Replit wouldn't be Replit without our community. Our community is a global group of hackers, learners, educators, and entrepreneurs from all walks of life. It's extremely important to us that they have a space to share their work and collaborate with one another. Features like Search, Profiles, and Publishing were all built with the goal of making the on-platform social experience better. In the past, if someone you know shared something on Replit, it would get lost in the sea of published Repls. As our community has grown and the number of published Repls has increased, it has become increasingly difficult to discover new content and keep up with the work of your friends. This shouldn't be the case. If one of my friends publishes a cool Repl, I should know about it! Enter: Following!
Wed, Jul 20, 2022Revamping the GitHub Import Flow
Early last year, we made the announcement that our infrastructure and Repls now had Nix baked in. Just a few months ago, we announced all new Repls would be Nix-based. And today, we're happy to announce that our GitHub imports flow is now also powered by Nix! For a while now, the state of Git and GitHub integration within Replit has been a major pain point. One of the foremost problems was that while the rest of Replit jumped on the Nix train, repos imported from GitHub were still forced to use the old Bash style Repls. We hear you: it's frustrating not to have the ability to use our packager or to go through a convoluted multi-step import experience. While many other parts of Replit have been getting frequent updates and reworks, the code powering everything Git was left behind. It was thought that this change would be a rather significant and difficult change. The longer we pushed it off, the more adamant we became that we'd need to get it done right this time. We finally decided that enough was enough - we dove deep into actually resolving this. And after some changes, we very quickly realised that the problem was not nearly as scary as we thought. After some tinkering, your GitHub imports should now be faster and more intuitive than ever! Here's a side-by-side comparison of the two flows:
Thu, Jul 14, 2022Inspect your HTML/CSS/JS Repls with native DevTools
We recently launched a new Replit-native way to inspect and debug web pages you build on Replit. Whether you're learning the basics or hosting a rich application, quickly being able to inspect the console and DOM is critical to your workflow. Browsers ship with developer tools (e.g. Chrome), but they have a few shortcomings when working on Replit: Inspecting the nested webview iframe using browser DevTools can be complicated There are no solid solutions for developers working on mobile devices Some schools block access to browser DevTools Now all repls that show a webview have access to a Replit-native set of DevTools. Just click the wrench icon to bring it up:
Wed, Jun 1, 2022The New Publish Flow
TL;DR - sharing stuff you make on Replit is now easier than ever. Replit has the most powerful primitive of any social platform that has ever existed. On Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and many others, you only have the option of sharing text, images, and videos. On Replit, the core primitive is a computer. The thing that's actually shared on the Replit social network is a runnable machine. We've had users build and share games, personal websites, trading bots, password crackers, operating systems, and even MacOS clones. In the past, the process of sharing your work on Replit has been buggy and confusing. The old publish flow didn't make much sense, especially to new users. It used to be unclear what "publishing" really even did. I'm excited to share that we've completely revamped the publish flow. Not only is the sharing experience more streamlined, but creators have more control over how people actually consume their work.
Tue, May 31, 2022“Generate code”: state what you want, get code back
Today, we're launching “Generate code” to all subscribers of our Hacker Plan. With “Generate code”, you state what you'd like your code to do, and an artifical intelligence writes it for you. You can then run the code right from your repl, with all the other Replit features you know and love (packages get magically installed, a web server gets started if you need it, you can invite your friends for a multiplayer session, and much more). At Replit, our mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. We think that in order to achieve that mission, we need to bring the time from idea to running code to as close to zero as possible. Along with the many features we already offer, we think code generation is a major step in that direction. If you're a beginner, you can use code generation to get a starting point from which to build your idea. If you're an experienced programmer, you can use code generation to quickly get snippets of code without having to leave your repl. And no matter what your level of experience is, you'll likely find that using code generation is a ton of fun! If you're a Hacker Plan subscriber, head to the workspace and pick the “Generate code” feature from the context menu. Tell it what you want, and it will automatically detects the language of the file you're in and give you back its best attempt at what you requested.
Sun, Apr 17, 2022Your New Replit Profile
You may have noticed that the "My Repls" and "profile" pages look different. We decided to combine these surfaces into one unified page. The new profiles are fresh, more social, and more customizable than ever before. Go take a second and customize your profile! Add links, a banner, and pin your favorite Repl. What changed? We combined the My Repls and profile pages Live presence
Wed, Mar 30, 2022We Built a Search Engine
For the past few months, we have been building a Replit-native search engine. It is remarkably powerful, and we are really excited for you all to try it out. We believe that you should be able to find anything on Replit in less than 30 seconds. This might sound simple, but when you have 100 million+ Repls, it becomes complicated. :) When you search for something on Replit today, you'll see a page with relevant results from the following categories: Repls Templates Code (yes, code)
Wed, Mar 9, 2022Betting on CodeMirror
At Replit, our mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. In order to achieve that ambitious goal, we need to make sure that the experience of writing, running, and sharing code is as seamless as possible. At the heart of that experience is the editor itself. As a result, we dedicate a huge amount of time and energy to improving the stability, performance, and accessibility of our editor. Monaco For years, we had been relying on Monaco to power that experience. Monaco is the open source editor behind VS Code, written and maintained by Microsoft. At the time, the decision to adopt Monaco was an easy one. It was packed full of useful features that helped users navigate and write code quicker, had built in support for a large number of popular languages, and looked familiar to those coming from VS Code and other popular IDEs. These reasons, along with its growing open source community, quickly made Monaco the de-facto way to write code on the web.
Sun, Feb 27, 2022Kaboom Draw
Programming is hard, especially for beginners where the code <-> output feedback loop is cumbersome. People need to click run button, see output, change code, click run again see output. There are a lot of ideas that greatly improved this experience like live-reloading (a lot in the audio / visual context, and UI dev). However the most exciting idea I've seen is still the experiments done by Bret Victor, like in Learnable Programming. Seeing his experiements on combining live reload + sensible controls still takes my breath every time. You might know we're on the way of adopting Codemirror 6 to replace Monaco for a more extensible and maintainable editor (shoutout to Sergei for carrying us through this hard time!). One day I saw Faris made a css color picker codemirror 6 extension and it got me thinking, hmm CM6's extension system is really handy, what if we make some more sensible controls over all kinds of values, and make something like the Bret Victor experiments? Excited by the idea, I decided to do shove off some non-urgent tasks and do a little hack week on my own to jam out these thoughts. But first, gotta book a slot on the demo calendar: excited to excite Barron
Fri, Feb 11, 2022Announcing File Persistence in Hosted Apps… for Everyone!
Replit is your computer — for whatever you need to do. We announced last year that Hackers would be able to have their hosted apps be able to persist file changes since that made it possible to build a lot more apps. But we were not quite satisfied that only Hackers were going to get this new feature. Today we are announcing that we are opening this up for everyone! Why the change? Back in November, we knew that this new feature was going to have a small, but measurable, impact to our infrastructure. This meant that opening this up for everyone from the get-go was not ideal. We wanted to get this out to users as soon as possible, so we decided to be iterative. We crafted a plan to open this up for Hackers first to observe what a realistic load would look like, while pondering some potential optimizations that we could use to improve it. In addition, we added more monitoring just in case anything came up. After enabling this and blogging about it, we saw a very small difference between our predictions and reality. The plan had worked! And our hunch about something unexpected appearing was right on the money: the extra monitoring enabled us to find (and fix) an extremely low-probability bug that could only be observed when operating at Replit scale. With the new data, we could make data-driven decisions. We went through the planned optimizations and the additional load is now in a much better place, so we're comfortable opening this up for everyone.
Fri, Feb 4, 2022Making new Python repls 100x faster to start up
Python is currently the world's (and Replit's) most popular programming language. We've improved the Python experience during last year, with a Python package cache to make installs faster, and an integrated, multiplayer debugger to increase the understanding of what programs do. But there are still a few problems with Python. Packages are often very space-consuming, so they are installed into an ephemeral 2 GiB scratch disk to avoid filling up repl directories. Unfortunately this means that every time a Python repl starts, a lengthy package installation process must happen. This makes some Python repls take forever to start! Some other packages that have a large number of dependencies (like TensorFlow and Torch) were completely unusable because they don't even fit on the scratch directory. We decided to address these shortcomings and make Python a bit faster on top of that! Today, we're releasing a brand new Python template that has a lot of neat things. Newly created Python repls will now be based on nix so that additional programs and libraries can be installed, have a standard virtual environment stored inside the repl, and a brand new caching mechanism so that packages are installed even faster and they don't take up too much space. I had the wildest dream, that I was able to run the TensorFlow 2 quickstart on replit without running out of disk space or memory How does it work? We had a few goals in mind when we started designing this:
Fri, Jan 21, 2022Going Where the Next Billion Creators Are
Mobile is the future of computing. But building good software creation tools for mobile devices is hard. Luckily, at Replit, we like to run toward the hard things. This week, we launched a completely rearchitected mobile IDE for web. If you’ve used it before, the new version won’t look much different, but it will likely feel different. Why We Care Mobile devices are the world’s most ubiquitous computers. At Replit, we have kids coding their next big idea on their phone on the way to school, instead of scrolling through social media. We have local communities in developing countries learning & teaching code together on their phones, in order to get hired for jobs. We have colleagues coding prototypes in multiplayer and demoing their work on their phones, while they are on the go. We even noticed users sharing Replit coding tutorials on TikTok: @coding4python3 Antwoorden aan @wewillcum #replit #code #coding #coding4python3 #python ♬ origineel geluid - coding4python3
Tue, Jan 18, 2022Use Replit At Work With Teams Pro
For the past 6 months, we have been testing Teams Pro while in private beta. Today, we are excited to release it to the world. Teams Pro is Replit for work. If your company wants to have a collaborative repository for sharing and editing code, create a team now. Here's what some of our users are doing: Host slack bots, cron jobs, web scrapers, scripts, webpages, and more