I didn't expect it to blow up, so it wasn't 100% finished when I posted it. But it should stabilize pretty quickly.
Happy to know what you think and talk about it.
I didn't expect it to blow up, so it wasn't 100% finished when I posted it. But it should stabilize pretty quickly.
Happy to know what you think and talk about it.
$ curl -fsSL https://www.ghost.charity/install.sh | bash Checking for Ghostbox updates... curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 404 Could not fetch ghost-linux-x64.tar.gz from https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases/releases/late...
"There are spare machines everywhere. GitHub Actions is only the first place ghosts come from." ... seems a bit odd.
We need more of these. There are too many sandboxes that charge insane prices.
Curious what this runs on though and it would be great if this was completely open source.
Great work!
Also the repository itself doesn't exist anymore as it shows me a 404, I haven't run any code or anything but it would definitely be nice if keepamovin talks more about it as the idea itself is nice but yeah.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260501150640/https://github.co...
If you choose a specific company's free tier, you can rely on reputation and switch if they misbehave (e.g. they exfiltrate your secrets, log all your activities, build a profile on your workload behavior, etc). But if you don't know where your workload being deployed, the operator has less incentive to treat your compute with respect.
Means this is really only useful for nearly-public workloads, where tampering is not a critical failure mode.
This service uses GitHub Actions and it is likely against GitHub's terms of service and GitHub can pull the rug if they wanted to.
If you don't own it, there is always a catch when something claims to have a "free tier". This is one of them.
> Ghostbox is software for launching short-lived development machines using third-party infrastructure such as GitHub Actions, tunnels, shells, agents, and related developer tools.
So this will go down, just like GitHub Actions since it abuses the subsidised free tier of GitHub Actions to run a service like this and it is likely against the GitHub TOS.
IN future, I think I'll add other providers.
I can't believe it but your little project has for the first time in my life put me in the position of defending Microsoft. I hope they shut it down ASAP.
Odd to be so tied to GitHub for proprietary code.
The broader concept seems to be "ephemeral environments", which is related to sandboxing, which is in turn is related to testing/debugging...
Related:
https://github.com/topics/ephemeral-environments
https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/state_harmful.p...
It's quite irresponsible of them to have almost all the core features free and a paid tier would significantly reduce abuse of it (and especially GitHub Actions) like this.
If they don't, then don't be surprised to see more outages on their platform.
But the reason I created this was because Actions always worked so well for me, and it seemed to have so many possibilities to build things on it.
Regarding the Global Free Tier, every GH account comes with Actions Minutes and this is way to have a nice CLI to put them to use toward your building, and maybe have a spot for agents to do some work you don't want locally.
Bigger picture, I feel GH led the way providing this idea of "compute as utility" (free compute for even free GH accounts, was amazing - but I really think that the future is shaped like that). I'm serious about that: AI will eventually become cheaper to train and infer, and the oversupply of compute will be a background layer we will have access to much cheaper. Just one of the trends. So the idea of the Global Free Tier or Background Compute as a universal utility, is something I think si really real.
Also probably important to note that the reliability issues GH seems to have faced, are more of a recent uptick, but Actions has had this free tier for ages.
It sounds like Github Actions is the first choice, if it's unavailable (or if Github blocks GhostBox in the future), are each of the alternatives viable as a more or less drop-in replacement? Or would there be loss of functionality?
Those are the questions I had when reading through the site so I think some basic technical docs would go a long way to help people understand the project and decide to give it a try. I like the cute/whimsical branding but I'll admit to doing a little internal eye-roll when I clicked that link expecting technical specifics and instead read:
> GitHub Actions is only the first place ghosts come from. There are strange little pockets of temporary compute all over the internet. Ghostbox makes them feel like one small machine.
AI=generated article that asks you to download and run some random binary. Github account is just more AI slop. Everything to me just screams that it's a malware. Or this is normal here?
Some years ago I toyed with the idea of running a minecraft server inside github actions, I used tailscale to create a public endpoint and saved the world in an artifact that was re-loaded on the next run. It worked really well, but the point was never to actually use it for real.
First, I am fairly certain this violates Github's ToS. Second, it effectively amounts to a denial of service. Third, are people seriously using the .charity TLD to host something this frivolos? Have people got no sense of propriety anymore?
You can read what it is more clearly, here: https://github.com/crisdosaygo/ghostbox-home-reveal
You have to go back further back than that, to the Great Recession, IMO.
> Have people got no sense of propriety anymore?
Judging by the proportion of drivers with their high beams on, blinding me on well-lit roads after dark - no, not anymore.
Imustaskforhelp•5h ago
Basically any golang/any language cli application preferably-static can be dropped and ran in ghostbox plus xterm in browser (and additionally cloudflare tunnels) or perhaps directly to give a web link.
Anyone can then click on that web link to then try out the cli application. Think jujutsu and others too and they can do this upto 90 minutes.
Feel free to pick up on this idea as more importantly than not, I would personally love to see an idea like this, even something with asciinema to finally show how an app feels and looks.
Can you please tell me more about what is the structure behind Ghostbox and on what service does it run upon? Hetzner/OVH or something else? I would be interested to know more about the infrastructural decisions behind it and does it run on firecrackers, quite so many questions!
This is a really cool project, thanks for making this and have a nice day!
keepamovin•4h ago