{"id":49908611,"title":"Show HN: Range – open a 1TB Linux environment in under a second","points":4,"user":"andreygrehov","time":1790774682,"time_ago":"4 hours ago","type":"link","content":"

Hi HN. My name is Andrey.

Range lets you open a Linux environment of any size without downloading it first.

Let me just show you what i mean by that.

Example 1. Any docker image.

Say i want to test something with Python 3.12

  $ range shell python:3.12\n

\nThis will download the image and index all the layers, but this happens only once (same as docker pull). \nThe fun part is the second run:

  $ range shell python:3.12\n\n  Range environment\n    Artifact          python:3.12\n    Logical size      1.35 GB\n    Runtime           darwin/arm64\n    Workload          interactive\n    Profile           4 prior sessions\n    Ready             2.82 s\n\n  root@range:/# python3 --version\n  Python 3.12.14\n

\nYou are inside in 2.82 seconds. Now, say you want python:3.13 after that. Since 3.12 and 3.13 have common layers:

  $ range shell python:3.13\n  Indexing python:3.13, layer 5/7, 6.20 MB, once\n  Indexing python:3.13, layer 6/7, 26.89 MB, once\n  Indexing python:3.13, layer 7/7, 249 B, once\n\n  ...\n\n  root@range:/# python3 --version\n  Python 3.13.15\n

\nYou are in! We only downloaded 30MB out of 400MB simply because Python 3.12 and 3.13 share the first 4 layers.

Example 2. I don't want to download at all.

  $ range shell https://github.com/andreygrehov/range/releases/download/demo/go1.23-arm64.range\n  [1.85 second later]\n  root@range:/go# go version\n  go version go1.23.12 linux/arm64\n

\n.range is my own format. The filesystem is already indexed, so there is nothing for you to index, therefore almost nothing to download (above example - 6MB out of 1GB). I plan to index top NN docker images so that you don't have to download anything on the first run ever.

See https://getrange.sh to learn more :)

github: https://github.com/andreygrehov/range","url":"item?id=49908611","comments":[],"comments_count":0}