ridruejo - 14d
We just released v0.2 of Endor, our tool for creating dev sandboxes that run Linux inside the Node runtime. With a simple command like
'npx -y u/endorhq/cli@latest run alpine --shell --allow-net'
you can have a fully functional 32bit Alpine Linux instance with networking, within 4-5s. It is ephemeral and sandboxed, so as soon as you press Ctrl-C, everything is gone. Great for quickly testing stuff. It is based on the Wasm engine inside Node, so it runs way slower than native, but usable
More info in our announcement blog post: https://endor.dev/blog/endor-0-2
What is the use case for needing to run Linux inside of Node.js?
The article provides a few examples. Basically is a way to get a lightweight Linux when you cannot assume Docker will be there or will be an extra dependency to manage/require.
Examples: Run a MySQL database for development purposes, run a Linux signing script in Windows, run some legacy code as part of a modern web stack, isolated environments for AI agents, etc