Show HN: Program Explorer, a container playground(programexplorer.org)
programexplorer.org
Show HN: Program Explorer, a container playground
https://programexplorer.org/
14 comments
Congrats! It's amazing to see what CE has inspired! Thanks for the shout out :)
Congrats on a launch, sounds like your implementation is quite thoughtful. In fact limiting to only shell helps focus on what you're giving - 1 second of compute with 1GB of RAM, for free. Who knows what scripts people will try? I think sharing those scripts would be interesting. In that vein, sharing from you to your users, consider providing some example scripts that demonstrate the fiddly differences between base images.
Thank you! I'm also excited at the possibilities and today you can share "long links" (with all the data embedded in the URL's fragment) but in the future short links with storage on the server or loading from a gist for example would be another cool feature. And having a variety of interesting examples ready to go like you mention would be nice too. There's almost too much there that I was worried I would never ship and would still be playing with examples. For fun, here is the most basic version of compiler explorer https://programexplorer.org/#s=eyJjbWQiOiJzaCAvcnVuL3BlL2luc...
Feedback on the name: I didn't think that it would be about containers. The other platforms you mentioned are more descriptive (jsfiddle, db-fiddle, Go playground, and Rust playground)
Completely agree. It almost sounds like a website to discover new programs. At the same time, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that would be a better name.
Yeah names are hard and it is just a working name. I'm simultaneously using containers as the distribution and runtime mechanism but also wanted them to be an implementation detail and not the spotlight
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only supports running shell scripts?
You can run any program that is in the container you select. Right now it ignores the entrypoint from the container config (though you could manually copy that into the Cmd field). Shell is a convenient program to run though so you can pass it a script to then run multiple commands. But you can run `date` directly for instance: https://programexplorer.org/#s=eyJjbWQiOiJkYXRlIiwic3RkaW4iO...
I'm also interested in the user experience of setupless container execution. Containers have greatly improved program distribution, but serverless container cloud runtimes like Google Cloud Run or AWS Lambda still require transferring the container image, creating an executor, and invoking the executor. These cloud services also come with hardware caps like memory limits where if you need more than that, you're back to provisioning a server. I want science researchers for instance to be able to run any computational tool with no setup. Program Explorer is a step in that direction.
You choose a container image, set the args, edit the files you want to have at /run/pe/input, then it gets run in a fresh VM and sends back stdout, stderr, and whatever is in /run/pe/output. No network access.
You can also set env vars and attach a file as stdin for more control. Most flexibility comes from containers with a shell so that you can write a script to run multiple commands.
Currently, you can only pick container images from a predefined list, but suggestions on what to include are welcome. Each run is limited to 1 second (wall clock on a dedicated core) and 1 GB memory as right now the focus is on quick tests/demos.
The files you send and produce are never written to disk and not stored after your request is complete.
MIT licensed at https://github.com/aconz2/program-explorer. Briefly how it works: container images get packed (ahead of time) into an erofs image, a VM is run with cloud-hypervisor, init process unpacks your files and mounts the rootfs, crun runs the container, then pack your output files and exit code etc. (rusage is in there too if you open the JS console). The server is written as a load balancer using pingora so multiple workers could (eventually) be used, but that is a WIP and currently only has one worker.
I have lots of ideas and directions I'd like to take this but wanted to ship something so others could start playing with it. Looking forward to hearing your ideas and feedback!