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- Thanks, I know exactly something which has been in my mind to build which can be made possible with this.
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!
- Thanks, bud. Right now it just uses spins up an ephemeral machine from GitHub Actions. I mostly used GH myself so have not added any more providers yet - but the Global Free Tier is trending up. Will add more in future.by keepamovin
- This is interesting, but unfortunately it's a gradient on an infinite game of cat and mouse.
If blocking doesn't work, there will be phone verification. If that doesn't work you're gonna need to get orbed. If that doesn't work, you're gonna need to drink the verification cans. Or they will just kill the free tiers. There is no free lunch.
by avaer - No because it's not an abuse to block. The thread converged upon that mistaken idea, but that's not the reality.
The reality is it's just a CLI that makes Actions more useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982915
by keepamovin - Won't the supply-side incentives misalign with demand-side's desires in this case?
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.
by cobertos - That is why unless you own it yourself, a "free tier" is not truly "free".
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.
by rvz - I think you misunderstand what ghost is. It's not a cloud service. It's a CLI tool that runs workflows from your GH account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982915
The multi-provider angle is an interesting future direction. I built it atop Actions because that's what I use everyday, but I'm sure other similar things exist.
The main driver for me was I always felt actions had so much potential for a modicum of easier use, that would give huge benefits to my workflwos. Ghost CLI is that little bit easier.
by keepamovin - GitHub is going to love this. No wonder Actions keeps getting worse and worse.by sikozu
- No. That’s the crowd narrative, not the actual mechanism.
Ghostbox uses the your own GitHub account and Actions minutes for your own development workflows.
by keepamovin - The repository now appears to be disabled.
- Yeah folks on this thread mistakenly thought it was against ToS and flagged it to GitHub. I’m confident and trust GitHub will bring it back once they look into it. It’s not a ToS violation.by keepamovin
- Things like this are the reason why companies like GitHub then put everything under a paid tier.by orliesaurus
- Given the consistent outages everywhere on GitHub, they actually should put GitHub Actions under a paid tier only if they want their platform to be sustainable and stable. Period.
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.
by rvz - I know a lot of people talk about GH outages, but I personally haven't encountered it even tho as you can see form my profile (github.com/crisdosaygo) I'm on there everyday. Maybe my workflows don't hit the weak spots, idk.
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.
by keepamovin - The multiple levels of abuse here are astounding. That grown adults can think projects like this are acceptable, let alone promote them, is hard to believe. I am 90% sure this is yet another vibecoded project. Has vibecoding really corrupted people?
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?
by ctrlmeta - There are several claims here - ToS violation, denial of service, abuse - but 100% zero actual argument for them.
Ghostbox/ghost helps a person start and connect to workflows in their own GitHub account, using their own Actions minutes, for software development work.
You can dislike that. You or others can argue the ToS point. But trying desperately and deludedly to turn that into some nonsense statement about my character that you know nothing about is not criticism at all - it is just 100% werid-ass projection from you, and only abgout you. Do you get that?
by keepamovin - This website has completely lost its ethos.by chatmasta
- No, this is just using GH Actions runners as ephemeral dev machines for your software work, plumbed together with cloudflared and tor for SSH and HTTP connectivity. It would likely been just a % of all Actions across all other jobs even if it was wildly popular. This is a mistaken interpretation, in reality.
You can read what it is more clearly, here: https://github.com/crisdosaygo/ghostbox-home-reveal
by keepamovin - > Has vibecoding really corrupted people?
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.
by overfeed - That is moral panic, not an argument.
Ghostbox helps a user run dev workflows in their own GitHub account, using their own Actions minutes. You can criticize the project, you don't get to fabricate my character.
by keepamovin - Like social media vibe coding doesn’t change people. It just makes their character more obviousby croes
- this is exactly what a bad actor would do to temp the greedy. If they are providing free ssh access, why not just use an ssh client instead of curl|sh? That's crazy! And free compute is even crazier. I guess they could make money based off training or selling whatever you put on there.by fhn
- I'm not trying to make money on this. I just think it's a useful utility. The SSH tunnels are provided by cloudflared and tor (as a backup, CF free tunnels sometimes flake).by keepamovin
- To be honest a bit true, I use exe.dev and it prefers to use ssh or or just directly within the browser itself and that certainly helps with the trust (also exe.dev is awesome, +1 to it using since day 1)
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...
- Looks like the Github repo has already been nuked, I'm guessing for violating ToS on Github actions?by kitchi
- Sorry I forgot to set it public. It's fine now.by keepamovin
- The website has a broken github link. Repo is here https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases but it's only a README.md with binary releases. No public source code?by simple10
- So that's why we will see GitHub Actions continuing to go down so frequently every day of the week. From their "terms of service" [0]
> 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.
by rvz - You're mistaken - ghost is not a "service". It is a CLI tool. And [0] is precisely how GH Actions runners are used everyday. It's not something other.
ghost doesn't "abuses the subsidised free tier". When you run ghost it uses your free minutes, not someone else's.
In reality, the % of Actions total global minutes that would be used for these hybrid "human and/or agent real-time" workflow where you drop into a machine would be tiny compared to the bulk p95 which is automated workflows for CI.
This is for where you want to drop into a consistent environment and get into the weeds or have your agent debug what's going on, or use the security isolation to develop safely in Actions cloud rather than rooting your laptop with an agent perhaps.
by keepamovin - This idea is great in concept, and I think it's important to state that, but the GitHub Actions stuff is against TOS iirc + they will need to address that pretty quickly.