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
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/...
Based on what the commenter below found about sshpiper I believe that you use the ssh identity + the ip from the slot to resolve the vm target. sshpiper knows how to route the ssh identity + slot ip to the correct VM. I suspect you have a custom sshpiper plugin to do that routing.
You use the slot record indirection so you can change the ip of a slot without having to update everyone’s A records across the customer base. It also makes it easy to shuffle around vm-slot mappings within a customer. I haven’t tested, but I’m guessing this dns server is internal (coredns?), and the ips too.
I did something similar (ip + identity routing) for a project a few weeks ago. Yours is a lot more elegant with the dns indirection.
I’m no ssh expert, but in theory you should be able to ssh -J exe.dev myvm.exe.xyz for a one-liner? Or maybe you don't even need it, if that DNS server within the ssh exe.dev is the same as the public DNS. Pardon for not testing it yet!
> $ 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
Each VM you create (up to 25 of them) gets a different CNAME record of the form s0NN.exe.xyz where NN ranges from 01 to 25. Each of these names, from s001.exe.xyz to s025.exe.xyz, resolves to a different IP address.
Therefore the individual VM can be distinguished this way, and the account they are associated with can be identified using the SSH public key that is used to authenticate.
But if you just need a shell then yes, you can make something similar with docker.
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?
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.
Also, telling Shelley to get inspiration from the VM name can be fun.
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…
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/
> David Crawshaw - before this, CTO and co-founder of Tailscale
> Josh Bleecher Snyder - was a Director of Engineering at Braintree, amongst other things
Enjoy my creation https://love-storm.exe.xyz:8001