Show HN: Codebox, a Provider of Remote Workspaces

1 point

7 months ago

I’ve been working on a personal project called Codebox, a self-hosted system for provisioning remote development workspaces in a distributed way. I built it because I wanted simple reproducible development environments that could run across multiple machines without opening ports or relying on reverse tunnels.

How it works: - A central server provides a web UI and acts as the entry point. - Runners host and manage workspaces. They must be able to reach the main server, but not the vice versa - An agent inside each workspace handles SSH access and exposes HTTP services running in the containers. - A CLI on the user’s machine acts as an SSH proxy to connect to the workspaces.

This architecture lets you distribute the workload across different machines and networks while keeping deployment relatively simple.

I’m particularly interested in feedback about security and scalability.

Repo: https://github.com/davidebianchi03/codebox

Happy to answer questions or discuss design decisions.