Hi everyone,

I’m Hector, an indie developer and open-source enthusiast. For a while now, I’ve been tinkering with an idea that came from a recurring frustration: I wanted to spin up full, persistent development environments with real root access — something that felt as seamless as Replit or Gitpod, but self-hosted, private, and fully under my control.

That’s the reason i started PequeRoku.

Most cloud IDEs are great for quick demos or education, but they:

hide root access or sandbox your environment,

sleep after inactivity,

depend on proprietary platforms,

They can not be selfhostd

PequeRoku sits in between: It’s a lightweight layer that lets you create, manage, and connect to real VMs (qemu) through a web interface, with persistent environments you can control entirely. You can treat it like your own “Replit,” but everything runs on your hardware.

how it works

A FastAPI service handles VM orchestration (start/stop, allocate, snapshot).

A Django backend manages users, templates, and authentication.

A web frontend provides a terminal, code editor, and file management — all local, no third-party APIs.

This isn’t a startup or product — just a personal experiment I’m releasing for the community. It’s early: no packaged releases yet, but it works, and I use it daily for small coding experiments and testing isolated environments.

Useful stuff

GitHub: github.com/HectorPulido/pequeroku

Wiki (work in progress): github.com/HectorPulido/pequeroku/wiki

Blog post: My Own Self-Hosted Replit (and Why It Changed My Productivity)

For the next part...

I want to give the user the option if he will use docker containers (super fast) or vms (security and freedom)

Clone environment and share them

Conection with ZED and VSCode

I’d love to hear feedback, criticism, personal attacks, or ideas for improvement. I’ll be around to answer every question.

Thanks for reading,