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Hocus is a self-hosted application that spins up ready-to-code, disposable development environments on your own servers in seconds. You define your dev environments as code and launch them instantly from your browser. It's a self-hosted alternative to Gitpod and GitHub Codespaces.

Hocus integrates with any Git provider that uses the SSH protocol, like GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, or Gitea. It prebuilds dev environments on every commit for all branches like a CI system, enabling your team members to start coding with fresh, fully configured dev environments right away. Whether you're fixing a bug, building a new feature, or conducting a code review, Hocus has you covered.

Features

• 💻 Workspaces - disposable, fully-configured development environments powered by VMs, defined as code.
• 🏗️ Prebuilds - Hocus continuously builds your project like a CI system, so you can spin up a fresh dev environment in seconds and focus on coding rather than waiting.
• 🤝 Project Environment Variables - Declare shared environment variables for your entire team, making collaboration easier.
• 🔗 VSCode Integration - Connect to workspaces over SSH automatically with your local VSCode editor.
• 🧙‍♂️ Full Root Access - Unlike Docker containers, Hocus workspaces are full-fledged VMs, giving you full control over your environment. You can use Docker and nested KVM, run LocalStack, or even deploy Kubernetes;
• 🔄 Support for any Git provider that uses the SSH protocol - Connect Hocus to GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, Gitea, Gerrit, and others.
• 🚄 Monorepo support - Create multiple development environments for different projects in a single repository.

Get Started

Requirements

• x86_64 Linux, preferably with at least the 5.10 kernel
• KVM support on the host
• A Linux distribution which supports the target_core_user, tcm_loop and sd_mod kernel modules (generally available with the notable exception of WSL microsoft/WSL#9511)
• Git
• Docker, Docker Compose, and Buildx

That's it! Hocus is fully containerized and won't install anything directly on your host system. The following script will check if your system meets the requirements, prompt you to install any missing dependencies, and set up Hocus with docker-compose.

git clone https://github.com/hocus-dev/hocus.git
cd hocus
# HOCUS_HOSTNAME is the hostname of the machine where you are deploying Hocus
# If you are running Hocus locally, set it to "localhost"
# If you are running Hocus on a remote server, set it to the hostname of the server
HOCUS_HOSTNAME="localhost" ops/bin/local-up.sh

It will bring up:

• The Hocus control plane, a Remix application;
• Temporal, which is a workflow engine;
• the Hocus agent, which is a Temporal worker;
• Postgres;
• Keycloak, for authentication.

You can run ops/bin/local-cleanup.sh to remove Hocus from your system completely. Check out our quickstart for next steps and more information about managing your deployment.

Current State of Hocus

• Hocus is currently in alpha, but it's already useful for personal use. We are using Hocus to develop Hocus, but we don't recommend you deploy it for your team at work yet.
• Hocus currently supports single node deployment only. However, it is designed to be deployed on a fleet of servers in the future.
• While Hocus works well for most scenarios, there are known bugs and rough edges. For example, stopping a workspace may sometimes leave it in the stopping state indefinitely.
• Despite its imperfections, we're releasing Hocus now to get feedback and learn if others find it useful.

Project Goals

• Ease of deployment and management are central goals of Hocus, with minimal assumptions made about the underlying OS and hardware.
• Hocus should provide a native development experience with performance on par with bare-metal development.
• Hocus should be scalable to accommodate large teams, with support for thousands of users and heavyweight repositories. We're not there yet.

Roadmap

• Add basic single node support
• Optimize single node storage usage, performance, and reliability
• Add permissioning for teams, admins, and regular users
• Add multi-node support
• Add support for more IDEs, particularly JetBrains

Versioning

While in alpha, every version change should be assumed to be breaking. There are no upgrade paths.

License

This repository's code is licensed under the Elastic License v2.0, unless stated otherwise. The extensions directory and its subdirectories are licensed under MIT.

Newsletter

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