Exe.dev

302 pointsposted 15 hours ago
by achairapart
(exe.dev)

152 Comments

sccxy

7 hours ago

That must be worst website ever made.

Zero information available on mobile.

I thought it is some kind of portfolio site that does not work on mobile.

fredsted

4 hours ago

It's kind of funny our experiences are so diffent. I almost immediately surmised it's some sort of on the fly generated vm you can access via a ssh jumpserver. Which it is! It's actually really neat. It's quite obvious that the authors want us to just ssh into it and try it out first.

lnenad

4 hours ago

> I almost immediately surmised it's some sort of on the fly generated vm you can access via a ssh jumpserver

How? It just says `ssh exe.dev`. Unless you are clairvoyant.

integralid

4 hours ago

"ssh exe.dev" is exactly the Linux command you would use to connect there via ssh. And it's stylized like command prompt.

flexagoon

2 hours ago

The question wasn't "how to ssh into a server", it was "how did you figure out what it it from looking at the website"

PcChip

30 minutes ago

Because it literally tells you what to do

doublerabbit

an hour ago

"exe.dev is a subscription service that gives you virtual machines, with persistent disks, quickly and without fuss."

scroll down and hit the "about" link. I do agree though the landing page could be more resourceful.

I'm not going to SSH to a random server.

lnenad

41 minutes ago

That's my point, the home/landing page tells you nothing other than "try to ssh into this van"

rnewme

4 hours ago

Except it doesn't trigger the keyboard on my phone and I can't interact with it.

TJSomething

3 hours ago

It's not interactive. It's just an extremely brief brochure for the actual service, which is available via SSH. All the useful copy is under the About link at the bottom, which is so light as to fail WCAG contrast standards.

gavinray

4 hours ago

You are not the target audience if "how" was not apparent to you

hnlmorg

2 hours ago

I am the target audience and I still had no idea what the site was promoting from just the landing page.

davidmurdoch

2 hours ago

Someone else said it's not actually interactive. So which is it?

lnenad

43 minutes ago

I mean, I've done engineering work for the last 15 years on most layers of the stack. Seeing an ssh command into a fancy url does not tell me anything about what that is going to accomplish. But yeah, you must be right.

andai

3 hours ago

I became target audience after I had a cup of coffee...

codingdave

5 hours ago

Not a mobile issue. I am on desktop and had no idea what this service was because nothing on the initial UI explained what we were looking at. I went and double-checked when people here were talking about pricing and VMs. From the home page, I figured it was some text-based game or experiment and closed the page.

It looks like some people who work there are watching this thread, so to them I say: You have got to explain what this is, not just say "the disk persists..." and expect people to dig deeper. Most aren't that curious.

smallnix

5 hours ago

Agree, I finally found information via

Homepage -> blog -> docs -> "all docs" button:

https://exe.dev/docs/list

Which has an about and pricing etc.

That is very counterintuitive to just find out what this is.

deanc

6 hours ago

I wouldn’t go that far but some link to pricing and documentation would be useful. I have absolutely no idea what the offering is here without those pieces of info.

sznio

6 hours ago

Yeah. I managed to backtrack my way to the pricing through the about page.

It's really annoying when you're interested in a product but can't find a price.

jedimastert

2 hours ago

The exact text on mobile is

> ssh exe.dev

> The disk persists. You have sudo.

I've seen enough of these kinds of services in my lifetime that I also immediately knew what it was, for example sdf.org, which is one of the OG services, and various "tilde" services like tilde.town.

anttiharju

7 hours ago

I can see

> ssh exe.dev

> The disk persists. You have sudo.

on mobile

sccxy

5 hours ago

It is showing non-stop loading blink but nothing happens.

And cannot open keyboard if that is needed. It is like big CTA but does not do anything.

Very strange landing page for maybe cool product.

CiaranMcNulty

5 hours ago

It’s not a loading blink, it’s just some text telling you what the service is

867-5309

2 hours ago

it's a cursor ready blink

I think knowing what the ssh command does is a pretty low bar for this platform

throawayonthe

2 hours ago

i'm not sure what you mean; the demo runs with the ssh command in the centre, there's an 'about' link at the bottom, and that links to a docs index

it's fiine i think

Kiro

6 hours ago

Hyperbole much? I'm on mobile and think it's great. I wish more websites were like this. Just straight to the point instead of all the regular marketing fluff you need to decipher.

machinationu

6 hours ago

pricing information and what it does/how it works is not marketing fluff

ErneX

5 hours ago

I thought it was a web game.

Jolter

5 hours ago

It is not ”to the point”.

derrida

2 hours ago

It would be funny if it was literally the best website I've seen in like a year...

... which it is.

lfkdev

2 hours ago

Come on guys, it literally says 'ssh exe.dev'

twotwotwo

13 hours ago

So I tried this the other day after Filippo Valsorda, another Go person, posted about it. My reaction was 'whoa, this really makes it easier to start a quick project', and it took a minute to figure out why I felt that way when, I mean, I have a laptop and could spin up cloud stuff--arguably I already had what I needed.

I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) isolated and disposable environments and 3) can be persistent and out there on the Internet.

Often to get element 3, persistent and public, I had to jump through hoops in a cloud console and/or mess with my 'main' resources (install things or do other sysadmin work on a laptop or server, etc.), resources I use for other stuff and would prefer not to clutter up with every experiment I attempt.

Here I can make a thing and if I'm done, I'm done, nothing else impacted, or if it's useful it can stick around and become shared or public. Some other environments also have 'quick to start, isolated, and disposable' down, but are ephemeral only, limited, or don't have great publishing or sharing, and this avoids that trough too. And VMs go well with building general-purpose software you could fling onto any machine, not tied to a proprietary thing.

This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd sign up.

Also, though I realize in a sense it'd be competition to a business I just said I like: some parts of the design could work elsewhere too. You could have an open-source "click here to start a thing! and click here to archive it." layer above a VM, machine, or whatever sort of cloud account; could be a lot of fun. (I imagine someone will think "have you looked at X?" here, and yes, chime in, interested in all sorts of potential values of X.)

hobofan

3 hours ago

> persistent and public

I don't think that it's actually public? From one of their explainers, no public IP is assigned, so you'll need to ar least have to use an additional service like Cloudflare Tunnel to use it for hosting anything.

crawshaw

3 hours ago

[exe.dev co-founder here] You can make it public! Our TLS proxy supports it, and supports CNAME rules (plus a top-level trick) to let you put a domain name on it. To make the HTTP server on port 8000 of your VM public run:

    ssh exe.dev share set-public <yourvmname>

TekMol

7 hours ago

This is cool. I am currently using GitHub codespaces and I would love a version of it with nothing but a web based terminal. I don't need all the other windows they put around it. This might be it.

Trying my way around it now. Not sure what is going on:

    me: apt install apache
    the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "apt"
What is "exe.dev repl"? Am I not in a shell?

    me: bash
    the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "bash"
Damn, it seems the "shell" is not a Linux shell?

crawshaw

7 hours ago

[exe.dev co-founder here] Hi there, I am not sure exactly where you are, but your VM is ubuntu derived and definitely starts with apt and bash. Perhaps try `ssh yourvm.exe.xyz`?

Thanks for trying it!

setheron

10 minutes ago

While at tailscale you built sketch.dev only to actually build this product ? Love it. Ultimate yak shave. Kind of how like Antithesis was the product inside foundationdb.

TekMol

7 hours ago

I can't use a native ssh client. I am using a browser. I clicked on "Shell" on top of the screen.

Oh, I think I found a real shell now! You have to click "VMs" then on the VM and then "Terminal".

Yay, this is great!

fredsted

4 hours ago

What you connect to first is the exe.dev jump server/management interface. You can ssh into your vm from there. Try typing help

natrys

an hour ago

Very impressive demo. From VM curation to vibe coding something running on port 8000 in Shelley just worked in minutes. I imagine quite a few technically impressive things happening under the hood, would be interested in reading more about those.

Small nit: I think you should make it more clear in the docs (if not in the landing page) that one can just use any key with the ssh command the very first time and it automatically gets registered. Also on the web UI one should have the ability to add the ssh keys. I logged into the web UI first, and was a bit confused.

I think the pricing is alright for the resource and remote development features, though might be a bit much if someone doesn't need higher level of resources for deploying something that's mostly already developed.

Anyway, this reminds me of a product called Okteto that had similar UX. They were focused on leveraging k8s for declarative deployment. But for some reason they suspended their managed cloud/SaaS offering for individual/non-enterprise clients, I wonder if it was because they couldn't make the pricing work. Hope that doesn't happen here.

MontyCarloHall

13 hours ago

The individual plan says:

— $20/month

— 25 VMs

— 2 CPUs

— 8GB RAM

— 25GB disk

— 100GB bandwidth

Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM.

If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and bandwidth), and I'm not sure what the exe.dev value proposition is. (I'm also not sure why one would want to split 25 VMs across so few shared CPUs/such little memory.)

crawshaw

13 hours ago

No I apologize for the confusion (exe.dev person here). What is different about this service is you get dedicated resources that you share between your VMs. The initial allocation is conservative, we want to give people more (or drop the price).

The goal is to reduce the marginal cost of creating a VM to zero. Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM.

(I will get a better version of this table online tonight.)

lejalv

41 minutes ago

> dedicated Are plan CPUs pinned/reserved (dedicated) or time-shared with other customers under load, and what contention should I expect?

MontyCarloHall

13 hours ago

>Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM.

What is the advantage of this? Unless you need something exotic like different kernel configurations per instance, what's the problem with using containers on the same instance?

BTW, a Hetzner dedicated server with 2 CPUs/8GB RAM that would let me run my own hypervisor is about $14 USD/month. For anyone who's a big enough power user to care about the distinction of running distributed workflows on VMs versus containers, I'm not sure that an extra $5/month is worth your "hypervisor as a service." But then again, HN commenters infamously poopooed Dropbox [0], so what do I know? :-)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

crawshaw

13 hours ago

Containers aren’t enough for me. I like to do things like create TUN devices, run docker compose, etc. I believe the VM is a fundamentally better abstraction.

Consider this: sometimes when you are using a VPS, you start a new project and say to yourself, "I should put this on a new VPS." Not all the time, but it does happen. And when it does, we are faced with the problem that starting a new project immediately costs us $X/month. I would like a new project to initially cost nothing.

Kwpolska

4 hours ago

> create TUN devices

Is that possible and useful with exe.dev? The docs say:

On the networking side, we don't give your VM its own public IP. Instead, we terminate HTTPS/TLS requests, and proxy them securely to your VM's web servers. For SSH, we handle ssh vmname.exe.xyz.

> run docker compose

You can run multiple compose stacks in a single VPS.

> you start a new project and say to yourself, "I should put this on a new VPS."

I never did that.

sickcodebruh

13 hours ago

The docs remark “VMs share the resources allocated to the user” so I interpret as resources allocated to your account, VMs provisioned within those limits.

wmf

13 hours ago

The value proposition appears to be CLI cred.

BiteCode_dev

7 hours ago

That's decent value considering the price of a vps is close for much more work.

The only difference is the bandwidth: vps in europe givr you 10 tiles that, unmeterred.

Very cool for training: I can make people log into those vm and deploy nginx just for learning.

richardwhiuk

3 hours ago

It's not actually a VM - it's a container, and they are fundamentally different. This feels like false advertising.

earthnail

2 hours ago

I guess the question is: can I run systemd services ob their VMs? If not, then yeah that’s false advertising.

But my perception from the homepage is you can. Am I wrong?

miki123211

2 hours ago

I wish they'd auto auth you with Github based on your pubkey, in a similar spirit to `ssh whoami.filippo.io`[1]. That would remove so much signup friction.

SSH is really the only protocol you can do shenanigans like that over, it's a shame not to use them.

[1] (seems overloaded right now) https://words.filippo.io/whoami-updated/

crabmusket

an hour ago

That is neat trick, and interesting to know that's how ssh git@github.com works, but that does not feel practical for a real usecase. Aside from relying on a scrape of the Github users API (there's no "look up user by pubkey" API), what if I wasn't expecting to automatically log in with Github?

jcgl

31 minutes ago

Absolutely. For example, if I use specific SSH keys for specific hosts.

subdavis

14 hours ago

I signed up and started a VM. Didn’t really expect the default chat interface at boot. I’m currently on my iPad and would probably have bookmarked it for later, but now I’m playing with it. Cool idea :)

Edit: it comes out of the box with screenshot capabilities. The defaults on this are very well considered. Im impressed within the first 15 min. Edit2: this is very neat. I will be recommending it to my non-coder friends who don’t really have the local setup to use Claude but would like to try a Claude-like tool.

engr

20 minutes ago

I just tried this, genuinely groundbreaking! So quick to spin a VM and get going

Balinares

3 hours ago

In which country are the VMs hosted? Do you have a warrant canary? Where's the AUP and how much peeking into customer VMs and storage do you do to enforce it?

steeleduncan

4 minutes ago

None of this actually matters. If you want to keep your data private, host it on your own hardware. Countries, company policies, etc are all essentially irrelevant

adtac

8 hours ago

i got to try exe a while back and i have to say, the "Login with exe" [1] is probably the most magic thing i've seen since tailscale :)

[1] https://exe.dev/docs/login-with-exe

ffsm8

7 hours ago

That's called forward auth - or proxy auth

You can do the same thing - with the added burden of actually having to set it up once ... After you set it up, it's however just as trivial to add new systems like with this linked example.

I got pretty much everything I'm self-hosting like that via keycloak (which itself let's me do social with via GitHub and Google etc pp) and a very similar nginx config like it's shown in these docs.

But the initial setup took multiple hours, even if the adding new services which support forward/proxy auth is extremely easy now.

(Jellyfin sadly doesn't as an example)

Just saying it in case you want to check it out.

I think it's fantastic they added that/provide this to their platform - it's a wonderful value-add

sureglymop

6 hours ago

I think running and managing and possibly misconfiguring a keycloak java monolith would be exactly what I'd want to avoid which is why it's cool that they offer this.

ffsm8

6 hours ago

There are a lot other identity providers around you can pick from, I merely mentioned it as I personally use it, as it's so easy to run and integrate with social auth - and comes with features such as simple password-less auth.

The forward auth/proxy auth is not a keycloak feature, it's a proxy feature, which just need some identity provider. If you look for the mentioned term via Google or AI/llm you will find multiple options, some of which are as easy to setup as a simple docker run cmd with an open port

I.e. https://docs.goauthentik.io/add-secure-apps/providers/proxy/...

pingiun

4 hours ago

How do you proxy the SSH connections? I thought you could not do hostname-based proxying with the SSH protocol

crawshaw

4 hours ago

[exe.dev co-founder here] You are right, you cannot! It was quite a bit of work. We have a blog post in the works that should come out in a couple of weeks with all the details.

chiragjn

3 hours ago

Would be interested in this too, I did some work in the past to make it work via Envoy proxy using HTTP CONNECT but that requires plugging in proxytunnel[0] or nc on client side.

  > $ nslookup abc.exe.xyz  
  > abc.exe.xyz canonical name = s001.exe.xyz.  
  > $ telnet s001.exe.xyz 22  
  > Trying 100.20.12.135...  
  > Connected to s001.exe.xyz.  
  > Escape character is '^]'.  
  > SSH-2.0-SSHPiper
Looks like it uses sshpiper[1]?

[0] https://github.com/proxytunnel/proxytunnel

[1] https://github.com/tg123/sshpiper

copperx

8 hours ago

This is freaking fantastic. However, as a community college instructor I would like to have this self-hosted on a computer in campus. Excluding the CLI niceties, etc., it shouldn't be to hard to get a similar setup with Docker et al, right? (not for production)

integralid

4 hours ago

It's not possible to run real VMs with docker (though you can get something similar with qemu). VM isolation is also much stronger than docker's, and VMs tend to be much more secure.

But if you just need a shell then yes, you can make something similar with docker.

reactordev

14 hours ago

Oh I’m going to need more info than this. It’s a service that provides persistent disk and VM’s but doesn’t tell you what those shared resource limits are, what the pricing is, or anything other than to ssh in…

crawshaw

14 hours ago

Hello, an exe.dev person here. There are some very early docs, exe.dev/docs (which are also accessible over ssh once you ssh in). There is a lot more to come, very early days, please bear with us. I was not expecting to see it here today.

twotwotwo

13 hours ago

I have played with it and it's so easy get started with that now I want a quick-project idea as an excuse to use it!

I'm sure you've thought of this, but: lots of people have some amount of 'free' (or really: zero incremental cost to users) access to some coding chat tool through a subscription or free allowance like Google's.

If you wanted to let those programs access your custom tools (browser!) and docs about the environment, a low-fuss way might be to drop a skills/ dir of info and executables that call your tools into new installs' homedirs, and/or a default AGENTS.md with the basic info and links to more.

And this seems like more fuss, but if you wanted to be able to expose to the Web whatever coding tool people 'bring', similar to how you expose your built-in chat, there's apparently an "agent control protocol" used as a sort of cross-vendor SDK by projects like https://willmcgugan.github.io/toad-released/ that try to put a nice interface on top of everything. Not saying this'd be easy at all, but you could imagine the choice between a few coding tools and auth info for them as profile-level settings pushed to new VMs. Or maybe no special settings, and bringing your own tools is just a special case of bringing your own image or setup script.

But, as y'all note, it's a VM. You can install whatever and use it through the terminal (or VSCode remoting or something else). "It's a computer" is quite a good open standard to build on.

Is the chat descended from Sketch?

crawshaw

12 hours ago

Thanks! We are thinking a lot about how to prepopulate VMs. The first thing we are going to start with is a fast ‘clone’ command, so you can preconfigure a base VM then make as many as you like. Lots of other ideas floating around too.

Re sketch: the code is not the same but the agent is deeply inspired by it. Eg the screenshot support, which just seems obvious to us. Philip has done the heavy lifting here, he hangs out in the discord if you want to chat about it.

jeffrallen

5 hours ago

When you create a new exe.dev VM, you can tell Shelley what it's for. I've had fun results from, "surprise me".

Also, telling Shelley to get inspiration from the VM name can be fun.

reactordev

13 hours ago

This kind of stuff is right up my wheelhouse so curious how.

I love the idea of just ssh in and do your thing. I’ll bookmark and come back when there’s some more info. Things are going to move fast…

dominicm

8 hours ago

Dang, everything about this feels really well considered. Semi-throwaway, nearly bare-metal machines that I can put on the internet with basically 0 config? I'll take

crawshaw

8 hours ago

[exe.dev co-founder] Or don't throw them away! The disk persists. And thank you!

steeleduncan

3 hours ago

Sorry if I missed this in the docs, but how robust is the persistence? ie is it the disk that comes with a standard AWS VM? or is it a share backed by e.g. Ceph with multiple redundant copies?

crawshaw

2 hours ago

Details coming in the next few weeks. The contents are regularly replicated to a disk cluster, though we have some more experimentation to do before we commit to exactly how frequently. This space has a lot of trade-offs, we believe we have found a new and interesting one.

jauntywundrkind

13 hours ago

I really enjoyed using this service. I signed up on my phone two nights ago, (using termux + ssh) and then used the builtin web agent to setup a small webapp. I was up and running with an HTTPS server in minutes, since all the HTTPS certs are automatically taken care of.

I'm not using it yet, but the way that it handles sharing looks incredibly sweet: an excellent way to take "home-cooked software and bare-foot developers" "perfect software: an audience of one" from one to a few / many people. Just sharing links that people can easily sign into, without having to build a whole auth system seems ridiculously easy here, and that is super cool. You don't have to think about it, you can just build your app: this fills a huge gap that makes making connected online software so much easier. https://outofdesk.netlify.app/blog/perfect-software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334206 https://exe.dev/docs/sharing

I used the included Shelley agent, which has a perfectly adequate simple web ui, to do all development. It was able to debug a bunch of pretty gnarly problems, using screenshots & scrolling down to get check it's work.

My output is a super simple site, very close to vibe coded, in ~90 minutes, but I quite enjoyed setting up a little guestbook project here: https://nan-falcon.exe.xyz/

llmslave2

14 hours ago

I'd be interested if I knew who was behind the company and could reasonably trust that I wasn't going to get my data stolen etc.

crawshaw

14 hours ago

Hello, I am behind this company. My co-founder Josh Bleecher Snyder has also been hanging around the internet for a while. There are several of us hacking away. It is very early days, we have a lot of work to do to earn your trust but it is my intention to do so.

tekacs

14 hours ago

Pulled from your Github, just to make it easier for folks to make sense:

> David Crawshaw - before this, CTO and co-founder of Tailscale

> Josh Bleecher Snyder - was a Director of Engineering at Braintree, amongst other things

farslan

7 hours ago

Both are also early Go engineers and developers who hacked on the Go stdlib for years. Most people in the Go community know them. Great people, and the idea speaks for it. I wish them best of luck.

jeffrallen

5 hours ago

The devs are long time Go and Tailscale hackers, and have earned my trust several times over. They will earn yours too, I bet.

llmslave2

5 hours ago

Yeah it sounds pretty promising. Will def keep an eye out. Even just knowing who the humans behind the project goes a long way.

minimal_action

3 hours ago

I built a similar infrastructure, a bit more human friendly, for spinning up AI agents' sessions for scientific work rather than web dev. Also with Share link for the sessions. (https://ai-archive.io)

icedrift

3 hours ago

Super cool. I can't justify investing time in it at the planned pricing but I'll keep an eye on it if they can hack together a more competitive VPS option.

anomancer

3 hours ago

Seems like a great tool but login not working for me, am I doing something wrong?

``` ssh exe.dev Please complete registration by running: ssh exe.dev Connection to exe.dev closed. ```

Kwpolska

3 hours ago

I'm not a fan of making ssh the primary access mechanism for a service. Just make a simple Web panel for managing VMs, and actually explain on the service on the Web page.

Y_Y

29 minutes ago

I find ssh faster and easier. Anyway it's a good differentiator, there are plenty of web panels already.

sznio

6 hours ago

Looking at the pricing plan, even the cheapest one is overkill. I don't need that much. 2GB memory with a 6VM limit would be plenty.

drakmail

3 hours ago

I really like the experience, after being a stuck I just tried to ssh from my termux on phone and it really worked! Absolutely awesome

sureglymop

4 hours ago

Does anyone know e.g. a small systemd-nspawn oneliner to SSH in securely?

icedrift

2 hours ago

There's nothing dangerous about SSHing into an untrusted server unless you're using the same keys for everything.

m-hodges

7 hours ago

This is awesome. Would love to see a slimmer tier closer to a DO droplet or Hetzner instance that's ~$5-8 / month.

crawshaw

7 hours ago

[exe.dev co-founder here] Thank you! Not to give too many secrets away, but my hope is to follow a business model I have been part of before, and make it as cheap as possible for individuals so they encourage their employers to buy it for work. So I would very much love to get cheaper.

The two constraints are that, one, when small underlying resources are expensive (we hope to fix that soon by not being small!), and two, we do not want to make the resource allocation so small that the VM feels unpleasant to use. So there is a floor on how small we make them.

That said, I very very much want to drop prices. We started with conservative numbers.

dependency_2x

3 hours ago

With Shelly (and assuming a decent number of tokens) $20 is very good I think. But not everyone wants an AI.

mrs6969

2 hours ago

just to be clear, this is total resources for all the vm right ?

like you give 2 cpu. 8gb memory for 20vms. Which I believe you wont be able to use 20 of them at the same time if they share 2 cpu only

tarrydev13

4 hours ago

I'm trying to set it up but getting this error:

> ssh exe.dev

Please complete registration by running: ssh exe.dev Connection to exe.dev closed.

Anyone get a similar issue?

waldrews

13 hours ago

Might be a good place for yunohost/coolify style services, especially if you have multiple separate entities - though probably tricky to do inbound mail because of IP allocation?

finalhacker

3 hours ago

I like it. Great cli design. its so cool!

JohnMakin

14 hours ago

The description of authentication mechanism is confusing me. it’s over ssh, but how is this integrated?

> Private by default, share with discord-style links exe.dev takes care of TLS and auth for you. By default only you can reach your HTTP services, and you have easy mechanims to share them with friends and colleagues.

Is anyone with access to a link able to get in?

achairapart

13 hours ago

I also don't understand this: Everyone with the right domain can ssh-in the vm?

Edit: Answered below, thank you.

jauntywundrkind

13 hours ago

You ssh in with any key, and it asks you for an email to verify. You're then at a exe.dev console.

There are a couple different link patterns:

  exe.dev ▶ doc sharing
  Sharing (sharing) - press q to exit
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  You can share your VM's HTTP port (see the http proxy documentation /proxy) with your friends. There are three mechanisms:                                                                                                                     
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  1. Make the HTTP proxy public with share set-public <vm>. To point the proxy                                                                                                                                                                   
  at a different port inside the VM, run share port <vm> <port> first.                                                                                                                                                                           
  Marking it public lets anyone access the server without logging in.                                                                                                                                                                            
  2. Add specific e-mail addresses using share add <vm> <email>. This will                                                                                                                                                                       
  send the recipient an e-mail. They can then log into exe.dev with that e-mail,                                                                                                                                                                 
  and access https://vmname.exe.xyz/.                                                                                                                                                                                                            
  3. Create a share link with share add-link <vm>. The generated                                                                                                                                                                                 
  link will allow anyone access to the page, after they register and login.                                                                                                                                                                      
  Revoking the link (which can be done with the remove-link command)                                                                                                                                                                             
  does not revoke their access, but you can remove users who are already                                                                                                                                                                         
  part of the share using share remove <vm> <email>.

JohnMakin

13 hours ago

Thanks! love the idea, looking forward to playing with this. I understand now from comments that this was brought to this site sooner than intended, sorry if I asked in a rude way.

ilaksh

14 hours ago

Are they actually VMs, or are they containers? Some kind of special container like gvisor? Firecracker microvms?

crawshaw

14 hours ago

Hello, an exe.dev person here. They are VMs, on a crosvm-derived VMM. So I consider them "actually VMs", though we do not currently support custom kernels. You can do VM things in there, like create TUN devices, etc.

ilaksh

14 hours ago

Thanks. So KVM I assume. Congratulations on your launch. Any plans for public IPs?

crawshaw

14 hours ago

Thank you! Yes, KVM. And public IPs are very useful and we want to do them. We will have to charge and/or limit them, unlike VMs, unfortunately, because IPv4 is scarce. (I am busy trying to buy some right now.) You can follow along here: https://github.com/boldsoftware/exe.dev/issues/6

jauntywundrkind

13 hours ago

Not super important to me (and you state explicitly it may change) but your docs are a little out of date here, I think. crosvm versus Cloud Hypervisor / Kata Containers, is, I think, different?

  exe.dev ▶ doc how-exedev-works
  How exe.dev works (how-exedev-works) - press q to exit
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  You're an engineer. We're engineers. Let's talk about what's going on under the hood.                                                                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  An "exe.dev" VM runs on a bare metal machine that exe.dev rents. We happen to use Kata Containers and Cloud Hypervisor, but that's a bit of an implementation detail (and may change!).                                                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  With most providers, your VM starts with a "base image" and is given a block device. Exe.dev instead starts with a container image (by default, "exeuntu"), and hooks up an overlay filesystem to the VM. This makes creating a new VM         
  take about two seconds. In exchange, we lose some flexibility: you don't get to choose which filesystem you're using, nor which kernel you're using.                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  On the networking side, we don't give your VM its own public IP. Instead, we terminate HTTPS/TLS requests, and proxy them securely to your VM's web servers. For SSH, we handle ssh vmname.exe.xyz.

crawshaw

13 hours ago

Yes our docs are out of date we are not using Kata, thanks.

vjay15

an hour ago

really cool stuff!

bhavaniravi

13 hours ago

Are there any fundamental differences between E2B and this?

crawshaw

13 hours ago

Hello, exe.dev person here.

I have not used E2B (though I really like their web site), though it looks like there are quite a few differences. Our disks are persistent (without manual snapshotting), we have a TLS proxy by default with built-in auth and link sharing.

It also looks like they have many features we do not have (yet).

I believe the target use is also quite different. You can use exe.dev VMs for running your agent. But you can also use it for hosting your site. E.g. blog.exe.dev is an exe.dev VM.

bhavaniravi

11 hours ago

Thanks for the response. In the "How exe works" page, it's mentioned that exe runs on bare metal with Kata containers, how is it different from firecracker? Were there any advantages?

crawshaw

8 hours ago

The mention of Kata is out of date, we are fixing that, thanks! Our underlying VMM is very similar to firecracker (same upstream source). We believe our advantages are in how we run it. Several blog posts are in the works about technical details!

GalaxyNova

7 hours ago

Is there a reason for the lack of IPv6 support?

crawshaw

7 hours ago

[exe.dev co-founder here] It is planned! The reason we have not got to it yet is it needs to be very different than IPv4 support. We have spent a lot of time on machinery to allow `ssh yourmachine.exe.xyz` work without having to allocate you an IPv4 address. The mechanisms for IPv6 can and should be different, but they will also interact with how assigning public static IPv4 addresses will work in the future.

We do not want to end up in the state AWS is in, where any production work requires navigating the differences between how AWS manage v4 and v6. And that means rolling out v6 is going to be a lot of work for us. It will get done.

I added a public tracking bug here: https://github.com/boldsoftware/exe.dev/issues/16

Alifatisk

14 hours ago

> exe.dev is a subscription service that gives you virtual machines, with persistent disks

aleksandrm

13 hours ago

Thanks, I couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong. The front page is just... not helpful. Given the amount of pushbash how everyone feels about this, it should be removed from HN frontpage!

satiric

14 hours ago

Thanks. I feel like I expect home pages to contain at least a modicum of information. And three seconds spent thinking about accessibility would have told them that light gray links on a white background are a terrible idea...

crawshaw

14 hours ago

Apologies for the vagueness of the home page, we were not expecting to be here today. There is a little more info in our first blog post https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev and docs, but far needs to be written.

(We have also built some interesting tech behind this that we are excited to write up, I have a doc two pages long of blog posts we want to write.)

mcny

14 hours ago

The blog doesn't work on Firefox on Android for me

https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev

Secure Connection Failed

    The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
    Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

crawshaw

13 hours ago

I just tried this out in Firefox on macOS and there are no issues, so this might have something to do with our LetsEncrypt wildcard cert and the CA roots installed on Android. Could you tell me what version of Android you are using?

mcny

4 hours ago

Moto g stylus 2025 - Android 15 - metro by T-Mobile stock os

Firefox nightly

148.01a

I'll check for updates

Edit: still broken

148.0a1 (Build #2016134322), 757b8230f44e4152aeb7b9031ff95219471ab993 GV: 148.0a1-20251226204324 AS: 148.20251224050247 OS: Android 15

Edit: also same on OnePlus Nord N30

147.0b7 (Build #2016133535), 455e50920c4926534376b719df4cf1ed714bc61d GV: 147.0-20251222164020 AS: 147.0 OS: Android 14

integralid

3 hours ago

Works fine to me too. Looks like you're the only person that reports that. Are you sure this is not something on your end?

What TLS error do you get? Untrusted CA?

esseph

10 hours ago

Works fine on Firefox/Android here

j0lol

14 hours ago

Other than a quick boot, what separates this from going on a VPS provider and spinning up servers?

DoctorOW

14 hours ago

Simpler and easier seems to be the answer. How much does it cost to spread 8gbs RAM across some VMs? Most providers require additional of how many VMs over how many hours, what the specs kf each are specifically, etc. Then once you have it you're setting up an SSH key or shared password depending on use and they make the authentication simpler as well. Maybe wouldn't be great for a huge business but it's you just wanted the ability to play with an isolated server, it might be worth it.

fragmede

8 hours ago

If we're just throwing out ssh targets, there's also funky.nondeterministic.computer

Uptrenda

4 hours ago

I don't really see what's so different about this than any other dedicated server provider... I can sign up to any host right now and get an email with access to the server details... Like, what am I missing here?

aarning

6 hours ago

This seems to be a honeypot for associating your SSH public key with other identifying details.

fartfeatures

5 hours ago

Hardly, you can use .ssh/config to configure an SSH key just for this service.

jeffrallen

5 hours ago

It is a paid service, delivering a valuable developer tool, and which indeed uses ssh keys for authentication.

So, exactly what you said, but for the benefit of the user, and for the profit of the company, by offering an excellent product.

(I am a happy customer of their previous product, Sketch.dev.)

kosolam

7 hours ago

Err it doesn’t work on mobile

crawshaw

7 hours ago

[exe.dev co-founder] Hi! There is a mobile site. It is not super visible right now but you can use it to create VMs (and even build something on them with our agent if you like). If you ran into a particular bug I would love to get it in the issue tracker so we can fix it.

jdndbene

8 hours ago

ssh exe.dev gives me login required. What am I doing wrong?

Imustaskforhelp

4 hours ago

Awesome project which I first thought might have something to do with microsft .exe format but not that big of a deal and I find this project really cool and I had thought about similar project like these so kudos that you built something like this!

I mean it and I wish the best of luck for the project

That being said, I tried to look at it for asap golang project deployments and I am the creator of https://spocklet-pomodo.hf.space/ a single main.go + single dep multiplayer pomodoro (please note that it was one shotted out of curiosity and also frustration as https://cuckoo.team would sometimes glitch for me)

That being said, I face the issue where I can't have a go.mod or run go mod tidy because I face this error

exedev@crimson-cobra:~$ go mod tidy go: finding module for package github.com/gorilla/websocket go: pomodo imports

github.com/gorilla/websocket: module github.com/gorilla/websocket: Get "https://proxy.golang.org/github.com/gorilla/websocket/@v/lis...": dial tcp: lookup proxy.golang.org on 1.1.1.1:53: read udp 10.42.0.45:33739->1.1.1.1:53: i/o timeout

Hope that the project fixes this and wishing best of luck to the project. I am a little busy right now with studies but your idea truly inspired me and perhaps I want to create a similar thing or collaborate on it with you too so I will join discord hopefully sooner than later.

I am looking further into it and seeing if I can fix that error as I would love to host some exe.dev's services and wishing the best of luck for the project and hope that it becomes sustainable enough.

Out of curiosity, if I may ask, what is the tech stack behind this which generates the vm's. Is it libvirt or firecracker perhaps?

For my own use cases, I recently rediscovered incus and even ran it on cachyos on my desktop to try it out and there were some hiccups partially because I was running it on non standard debian/ubuntu but I am overall very pleasant with incus but still, I am interested in what tech stack you used so please discuss!!

Also what cloud provider are you using. Pro tip but if you are looking for something cheap, either go with ovh or upcloud.

I really really love hetzner a lot too. (Hey hetzner_OL if you are reading this, love hetzner, have a nice day and hope your christmas was good:)

But still hetzner is a little admittedly more strict than ovh but maybe hetzner can respond to it as I know that their policy can ban accounts if someone abuses and considering that you provide compute (to even free) chances of abuse can rise but overall hetzner's the cheapest so I hope hetzner team might make an special exception/response to your post/my comment.

I am imagining a github private action which ssh's into this and then updates and runs a simple shell script which can be a reinstall state every time someone updates something in git to get git-ops style workflow. If someone implements it for exe.dev, just credit me :) (if you so wish) ` An amazing product overall. 7/10 due to that one hiccup which saddened me a bit (but which I have faith can be fixed) but its a 9-10/10 potential and that means a lot and a 7/10 at launch is pretty good

Please just tell me every decision/question I had in depth since I love details about projects like these ^^

Another minor suggestion I can have is having asciinema gif too to showcase what it does for some people. To me I only understood to run the command ssh exe.dev which then helped me learn but the only way I understood what exe.dev does beforehand was reading the comments on HN

An asciinema can go a long way in this journey, perhaps, let me know your thoughts.

And have a nice day! One thing I am wondering tho is if you are gonna open source the project, one project which feels similar to your project which is open source is this https://github.com/ekzhang/ssh-hypervisor that runs on top of firecracker

crawshaw

3 hours ago

[exe.dev co-founder here] As of the past few minutes, some of our VMs are having intermittent network access issues. Working on it now.

UPDATE: this is fixed now.

montroser

14 hours ago

Some actual details here:

https://exe.dev/docs/how-exedev-works

https://exe.dev/docs/pricing

dang

9 hours ago

Thanks! We've added those links to the top text above.

ruined

14 hours ago

this post is downvoted, but these links are the meat everyone is complaining about missing

dang

9 hours ago

Please don't comment about downvotes. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If the downvotes were inappropriate, other users will usually correct them. In this case the comment ended up being heavily upvoted.

Unfortunately, complaints like the one you added don't get garbage-collected when that happens, so they linger on, adding noise to the thread.

behnamoh

14 hours ago

Is that the OpenBSD logo they're using?!

jeffrallen

5 hours ago

No, it's a reference to the OpenSSH one.

mmmmbbbhb

3 hours ago

$20 a mo seems overpriced.