apptron

Local-first development platform

"The amount of amazing technology in this project is staggering. Seriously, star this—it’s amazing." —ibuildthecloud

"WOW there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there!" —simonw (see full report)

User Guide

The "project environment" is the main object of Apptron. It is a full Linux environment running in the browser with a VSCode-based editor for you to do whatever you want with. For example, you can use it as:

• a development environment and editor
• a sandbox for AI and experiments
• an editor to publish static sites
• an embeddable software playground
• a way to run and share Linux software on the web

However, it is fully extendable, customizable, and self-hosted so you could even use it as the foundation for your own development platform or software system.

Unlike cloud IDEs, Apptron runs entirely in the browser and does not depend on the cloud. It also only happens to be an IDE, as it is primarily an IDE for itself as a general compute environment, similar to Smalltalk.

Since it is written mostly in Go, it has first-class language support for Go. However, you are encouraged to get other languages to work on it and add them as supported languages.

Linux Environment

Apptron runs Alpine Linux with a custom Linux kernel in v86 by way of Wanix, which gives it extra capabilities such as native Wasm executable support and access to various DOM APIs through the filesystem.

The v86 JIT emulator allows 32-bit x86 software to be run, which can be installed manually or through the Alpine package manager apk. A few packages are pre-installed including make, git, and esbuild.

Persistence

Apptron environments are like Docker images in that changes are not persisted unless committed or added to the environment build script. However, the project directory, home directory, and public directory are all persisted via browser storage and cloud synced. Changes outside these directories will be reset with every page load. However, you can mount more directories backed by browser storage.

Virtual Network

In order to install packages, full internet access is provided through a virtual network. You are given an IP from a virtual DHCP server on this network with every page load. This is known as your session IP. Session IPs are routable to each other, allowing communication across browser tabs and devices.

If you run software that binds to a TCP port on this IP, it will get a public HTTPS endpoint. If the service is HTTP, the endpoint will proxy to it for the duration the software is running, similar to Ngrok. Non-HTTP TCP services can be used over the endpoint tunneled over WebSocket.

Using Go

Go can be installed via apk, but it is better to use the built-in bundle of Go 1.25 that includes a pre-compiled standard library. Go runs significantly slower in the browser, so this saves a lot of time with the first build.

To mount and set up Go, run source /etc/goprofile.

Developer Guide

Prerequisites

• Docker
• Go
• npm
• wrangler

Start Local Apptron

make dev