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Show HN: GhostBox – Borrow a disposable little machine from the Global Free Tier

126 points by keepamovin 6mo ago

I built this because I was always creating machines on GH actions to test builds on different OS, and I wanted a tight CLI that could do it. I always saw Actions as this great resources and ephemeral machines you could do dev work in just were a natural way for me to work, so this grew out of that workflow. I didn't expect it to blow up, so it wasn't 100% finished when I posted it. But it should stabilize pretty quickly. Happy to know what you think and talk about it.

Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
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!
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  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.
anonymouscaller 6mo ago
Couldn't get it working on MacOS or Linux: $ curl -fsSL https://www.ghost.charity/install.sh https://www.ghost.charity/install.sh | bash Checking for Ghostbox updates... curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 404 Could not fetch ghost-linux-x64.tar.gz from https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases/releases/latest/download/ghost-linux-x64.tar.gz https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases/releases/late...
- gbraad 6mo ago
  Perhaps removed? "There are spare machines everywhere. GitHub Actions is only the first place ghosts come from." ... seems a bit odd.
  - keepamovin 5mo ago
    No, it runs on your own gh account, so - not "odd" as you think - instead, clever and useful.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  Should work fine now. REpo was not public at first.
throwa356262 6mo ago
@keepamovin this looks cool, but notice that your README and github links are ghosting us (404)
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  Thanks. I posted and really didn't expect any points. So checking back after 40 minutes and seeing it blown up was quite a shock. I'm working through all the things people have pointed out!
colesantiago 6mo ago
Its great that this is free for disposable use. We need more of these. There are too many sandboxes that charge insane prices. Curious what this runs on though and it would be great if this was completely open source. Great work!
- jetbalsa 6mo ago
  I know a guy who gets a bunch of old hardware as a recycler, We made the Shell On Demand Appliance for DEFCON[1] awhile back and would love to expand it, but power/internet would just cost too much. we have the hardware and software to do this. just not the long term recurring [1] https://forum.defcon.org/node/246908 https://forum.defcon.org/node/246908
  - keepamovin 6mo ago
    This is interesting. A quick calculation with AI suggests pricing for cents/core/GB/hour suggests cost for power+net is 0.5cent/core/GB/hour assuming "average load" (web browsing, installing packages). Or in otherwords ~$3.60 a month for a "tiny machine" on this load 24/7. I'm guessing with actual "per human" usage the cost per person is 10 - 30x lower. So you can serve 1000 people for free a month if you have $300 to pay for power/net. I took this further and developed a table of breakeven and profit costs for different user sizes: Total Users | Tiny Machines (15× / 25×) | Residential Cost/mo | Colo Cost/mo | Break-even Paying @ $3/mo | Profit Factor @ 10% pay ----------- | ------------------------- | ------------------- | --------------- | ------------------------- | ----------------------- 100 | 7 / 4 | $14 – $25 | $20 – $35 | 5 – 12 | 0.86× – 2.08× 1,000 | 67 / 40 | $144 – $241 | $200 – $335 | 48 – 112 | 0.90× – 2.08× 10,000 | 667 / 400 | $1,440 – $2,401 | $2,000 – $3,335 | 480 – 1,112 | 0.90× – 2.08× 1,000,000 | 66,667 / 40,000 | $144k – $240k | $200k – $333k | 48k – 111k | 0.90× – 2.08× All figures use May 2026 US averages (EIA power rates + CBRE wholesale colo data); power+internet only. Profit factor is if exactly 10 % of all users pay the $3/month tier, how many times does the revenue cover your total power + internet cost? My gut says these prices are still 20-30% too high at the mid-high end tho.
fhn 6mo ago
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.
- Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
  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.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases https://web.archive.org/web/20260501150640/https://github.co...
  - keepamovin 6mo ago
    The clean devX and minimalism of exe.dev definitely inspire by design for the ghost CLI. Essentially seeing exe.dev (which is a wholly different model, it's their own system - this is a local CLI tool you use to drive your GH account workflows), was the trigger for me to think "I should build this thing I've wanted for a long time". It's basically an improved gh CLI with a focus on real human-and-agent debugging and coding workflows on CI/multi-OS and infra, but written in a way where GH Actions doesn't have to be the backend - it's just the one I most use.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  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).
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  [dead]
cobertos 6mo ago
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.
- rvz 6mo ago
  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.
  - keepamovin 6mo ago
    I think there's a case for self-hosted runners, and right now it only supports the basic ubuntu, macos and window latest. But I see a path to adding the larger paid runners as part of the toml for machine shape in future.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  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 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.
rao-v 6mo ago
Is there a meaningfully useful version of automatically write to an encrypted disk / RAM that could be used with a random cloud instance? Obviously the decryption key would be in RAM somewhere but as a short term best practice it might be somewhat useful
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  That specialized. I think on GH at least the runner you get is random and opaque to you? For encryption you could add a user-script to the ghost config, it supports that.
pvitz 6mo ago
Segfault provides something similar with a direct ssh connection: https://www.thc.org/segfault/ https://www.thc.org/segfault/
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  That's cool, thanks for sharing that.
rvz 6mo ago
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. [0] https://www.ghost.charity/terms https://www.ghost.charity/terms
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  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.
D2OQZG8l5BI1S06 6mo ago
Weird to have a .charity TLD but promote abusing Github Actions as free compute.
- sikozu 6mo ago
  That's so weird.
  - keepamovin 5mo ago
    No. Weird is people lying about it then flagging the repo until GH auto-disables. Almost as if somebody didn't want folks to discover you can do your ephemeral-machine agentic/human dev workflows on your own GH Action free minutes rather than paying like Tilde.run, Fly.io etc. How weird indeed
- CodesInChaos 6mo ago
  Volunteering the money of others is a favourite human pastime.
  - keepamovin 6mo ago
    Ghost provides a configuration and a way to spin up tiny machines from your CLI, but designed in a way where GitHub Actions doesn’t have to be the backend. It’s the same effect as running gh create-repo, setting a workflow, and gh run workflow (gh is the official GH CLI). You can do the same with tmate and gh from the CLI now, this just has better devX and uses real SSH so you can agent forward to clone your repos like you would locally. It is not “abusing” GH Actions nor “promote” that, nor “volunteering the money of others” (?), it is helping you use the Actions minutes on your account better. For me it makes GH Actions, which I’ve always loved, way more useful, by saving time in the setup of these common workflows I use all the time: debugging a failure in CI. Getting an agent to iterate directly in the CI machine. Manual build and smoke on different OS, etc. I had this idea for a while and was waiting for GH or someone to release an easier CLI for this, for a year or two, but they didn’t so I built it myself.
  - cotti 6mo ago
kitchi 6mo ago
Looks like the Github repo has already been nuked, I'm guessing for violating ToS on Github actions?
- simple10 6mo ago
  The website has a broken github link. Repo is here https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases but it's only a README.md with binary releases. No public source code?
  - mbreese 6mo ago
    The readme says it’s proprietary code that’s free to use during a “preview”. Odd to be so tied to GitHub for proprietary code.
    - rithdmc 6mo ago
      GitHub is one of the most readily accessible sources of parasitic compute resources.
      - keepamovin 5mo ago
        "Parasitic compute" is strange way to describe "a user running dev workflows on their own GitHub Actions allocation" when you run ghost, it creates a "ghostbox" - an ephemeral machine on your GitHub account, on your GitHub actions minutes, accessible only by your SSH identity. It's orchestration around GitHub's infra. Proprietary software built on GitHub is not exactly an unusual category.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
  - ktm5j 6mo ago
    Yeah this seems pretty sketch.. I would not run that binary.
peter_d_sherman 6mo ago
An interesting set of ideas! The broader concept seems to be "ephemeral environments", which is related to sandboxing, which is in turn is related to testing/debugging... Related: https://github.com/topics/ephemeral-environments https://github.com/topics/ephemeral-environments https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/state_harmful.pdf https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/state_harmful.p...
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  Yes, that's about the shape of it, thanks! By controlling variables of the env (ie removing, fixing confounding factors), you can approach a more scientific process to development and testing, and make more rapid progress toward stability :)
6r17 6mo ago
I'd be worry about security tbf - this sounds cool until it's used to host some weird shenanigans and nobody has any kind way to tell who did what
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  Well it's linked to your GH account, and surely GH has logs of all the workflows that get run, so it's the same as regular Actions.
sbuas 6mo ago
Where is the source ? This looks fishy, no way I'll run this bin..
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  It ain't open source. You're free not to run closed-source software (tho OS/apps might be an issue ;)), but "closed source"/proprietary is 0 evidence of bad intent. And (sad but true) "open source" is 0% evidence of goodness - as the whole industry of "supply chain attack protection" can enthusiastically attest. Just so you know, in building this I ran hundreds of rust crates dozens of times on my personal laptop. In building BrowserBox I've run millions of times npm packages. ghost is actually a thing that helps with this risk - precisely because it provides isolated hybride (CI/automated + human in the loop/AI) dev flows, easily on your existing GH Actions minutes. Free minutes! (Thanks GH <3). How does it help? Because it's an isolated machine. Not even your ssh key is on it (SSH agent forwarding), but you can clone your repos and run CI/builds/dev/agents, and even gate secrets using GH's existing surface for this. It's a goto way to do dev securely - and protect against the very thing you (and many) falsely suspect ghost of. A paradox! But also a great opportunity to discuss where ghost helps - with the precise thing ppl mistook as doing. :) If you're super concerned - do a "ghost bootstrap" - create a workflow that creates a machine with a shape you want and add's tmate. Use tmate to ssh in. Download ghost, create an ssh key, add it as a deploy key to a repo you want to work on (if wf is not already in that repo), and then ssh into the ghost machine from your other runner machine (which could also be a VPS from "trad cloud", just sayin). Think about it: why would I spend 10+ years developing software in the open (see my GH: https://github.com/crisdosaygo https://github.com/crisdosaygo) and building a business on (primarily) security/browsing products only to throw it all away to do whatever it is people are imagining here? Think about it. Why would I steal anything from anyone? So sell a secret? To access a private repo? From some rando? How profitable could that be? It sounds ridiculous. And most important for me: I never have, am not, and would never do because I'm not a bad person. None of the fear makes sense: it's all totally unjust to level that at me in any way.
o10449366 6mo ago
As unreliable as GitHub actions are, this is what ruins nice things (free for public repos) for the rest of us.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  I have never encountered any Actions reliability besides occasional networking stalls halting package installations. Actions has been so reliable that's what inspired me to make this. It's literally my go to test and develop platform. And I've used 10,000s of action minutes a month for a couple years on corp and personal plans.
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  "You dislike this use of Actions" is not the same thing as "this ruins nice things." Ghostbox uses the your own GitHub account and Actions minutes for development workflows.
beardsciences 6mo ago
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.
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  I appreciate your "great in concept" part. ghost aligns with ToS: it's a CLI porcelain driving the user’s own GitHub account to use Actions minutes for their own dev workflows. There was abuse on this thread tho - not just the fake accusations against ghost and me, but people abusing the GH flag/report button on its repos, leading to them being auto-disabled. I trust GH will restore it once they look at it. In the meantime - if there’s a specific clause you think applies, you're welcome to share. I think it's a classic case of crowd madness.
orliesaurus 6mo ago
Things like this are the reason why companies like GitHub then put everything under a paid tier.
- rvz 6mo ago
  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.
  - S0y 6mo ago
    Do you realize how disastrous it would be for the open-source ecosystem to remove actions from the free tier?
    - nvme0n1p1 6mo ago
      Yeah, I can't imagine if open source maintainers had to pay for their own laptop, food, electricity, housing, transportation, or compute time.
      - kevin_thibedeau 6mo ago
        They might have to figure out running CI on their own hardware. The horror.
    - zbentley 6mo ago
      Open source developers got along perfectly well before free GHA compute. It hasn’t been around for that long.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  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.
toraway 6mo ago
I wish the link for "Global Free Tier" [1] included an actual list of the free tiers GhostBox is using (ideally also including some kind of table/rubric for comparisons and any limitations, benefits, etc unique to each). It sounds like Github Actions is the first choice, if it's unavailable (or if Github blocks GhostBox in the future), are each of the alternatives viable as a more or less drop-in replacement? Or would there be loss of functionality? Those are the questions I had when reading through the site so I think some basic technical docs would go a long way to help people understand the project and decide to give it a try. I like the cute/whimsical branding but I'll admit to doing a little internal eye-roll when I clicked that link expecting technical specifics and instead read: > GitHub Actions is only the first place ghosts come from. There are strange little pockets of temporary compute all over the internet. Ghostbox makes them feel like one small machine. It's a neat idea though, and I've definitely had moments where I wished I could just spin up a free, temporary VM/container to do something but didn't feel like researching the current free-tier landscape and filling out a sign-up form and stuff. [1] https://www.ghost.charity/#gft https://www.ghost.charity/#gft
- bensyverson 6mo ago
  Yeah, I'm open to this concept, but I'm a little hesitant to clone a private repo somewhere random and undisclosed and then inject secrets.
  - keepamovin 6mo ago
    ghost creates 1 private special repo in your account, as a unified home to hold your config and runners for all your projects - it doesn't create a repo somewhere else and doesn't need any random secrets. If you do want to customize the config and add secrets tho, ghost does support that - put their names in the toml and it will wire them through for up.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  Right now it's only GitHub Actions. I didn't want to overbuild in case it wasn't a thing for others. I mostly use Actions myself. But I'm open to adding more. I think the GFT is real.
sikozu 6mo ago
GitHub is going to love this. No wonder Actions keeps getting worse and worse.
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  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.
archargelod 6mo ago
Was this botted to the top of the front page? AI=generated article that asks you to download and run some random binary. Github account is just more AI slop. Everything to me just screams that it's a malware. Or this is normal here?
- saltyoldman 6mo ago
  botted, probably teampcp doing it's usual scams.
  - keepamovin 5mo ago
    You're completely mistaken about the architecture, lol. ghost is not some payload running inside your Actions pipeline. It's a local client-side CLI that orchestrates your GH account to configure ephemeral dev boxes for interactive and agentic work: debugging, building, testing. Just like on your local box, but in a clean slate, safe, reproducible machine. I actually had to go look up who TeamPCP even was, so I definitely need to clear up this wild misunderstanding. The irony of this whole thread is incredibly thick. By using ghost, developers are doing exactly what security professionals recommend! If you want to test a sketchy npm package or let an AI coding agent run wild, doing it in an isolated, ephemeral GitHub Actions runner (where your SSH keys are safely agent-forwarded, not stored) is 100x safer than running it on your local MacBook where your real AWS keys and passwords live. I literally built a utility that protects you against supply chain attacks by giving you safe, disposable sandboxes on demand. And the crowd here, 'spooked' by recent news which I wasn't even aware of, lol, too innocent -- is projecting their panic onto it and accusing ghost of being the exact thing it defends against. Truly a classic case of crowd madness. I was just happily building a better CLI to do my dev work while y'all were out here writing spy novels.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  [dead]
- justsomedudeguy 6mo ago
  or were the 'defend-microsoft' comments botted by AI, while the upvotes are organic? It's gotta be one or the other...
croemer 6mo ago
None of the links to Github work because you're pointing at the main branch instead of your default branch ghosts-only
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  I appreciate the catch. Will change it. edit: should be good now.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
aleksiy123 6mo ago
[dead]
arm32 6mo ago
Just shut this down.
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  No. It's useful - AI workflows are the future. Actions is perfect.
skywhopper 6mo ago
Nice way to automate the unethical destruction of the commons. Shared space and community standards are for suckers.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  You're mistaken - ghost is not a service consuming actions for itself - it's a CLI tool you run locally to drive workflows with sane default configs so you can easily drop into them and continue working or debugging in reliable and consistent infra, or have your agent do it. It is a better CLI for GH workflows (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982915), now whatever you were imagining. What did you imagine it was?
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  Calling it "unethical destruction of the commons" does not make it so. Ghostbox helps a you run dev workflows in your own GitHub account, using your own Actions minutes.
S0y 6mo ago
This is 100% against githubs TOS lol. Some years ago I toyed with the idea of running a minecraft server inside github actions, I used tailscale to create a public endpoint and saved the world in an artifact that was re-loaded on the next run. It worked really well, but the point was never to actually use it for real.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  No, these are dev machines you use for your software building, so it's not.
  - keepamovin 5mo ago
    Extra clarity: ghost creates boxes/runners for you, on your own Actions minutes, that only you can access.
- justsomedudeguy 6mo ago
  Different companies and websites will very often have TOS's that contradict each other. TOS is contract law, so any single TOS only represents that one company's interests.
ctrlmeta 6mo ago
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?
- croes 6mo ago
  Like social media vibe coding doesn’t change people. It just makes their character more obvious
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - keepamovin 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  - keepamovin 6mo ago
    You can criticize the idea. You don't get to invent my motives nor my character, you have no idea about me at all, and you're totally 100% wrong about me, that's it. If you have a criticism of ghost, make it. Otherwise you're just doing deluded moral posturing. Bye
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  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 https://github.com/crisdosaygo/ghostbox-home-reveal
  - 6mo ago
beardsciences 6mo ago
The repository now appears to be disabled. https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases https://github.com/crisdosaygo/ghostbox-home-reveal https://github.com/crisdosaygo/ghostbox-home-reveal
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  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.
dmsmb 6mo ago
gh will have to tighten controls or even completely stop providing free minutes. And then the whole community will cry about MS ruining gh. No folks, this is an infrastructure abuse and it will have net negative impact on most fair users
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  That's a claim, not anything else. Yelling abuse doesn't make it so. Ghostbox helps a human or agent run dev flows in their own (the human's) GitHub account, using their own Actions mins.
avaer 6mo ago
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.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982915
everyos_ 6mo ago
This is why we can't have nice things. I sure hope this doesn't result in GH disabling actions for everyone. Also somebody should Ghidra the project, see if they can find malware. I'm not saying anyone has to, just a thought
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  You are free not to run binaries you don’t trust. You are not free to launder a malware accusation through innuendo. "This is why we can’t have nice things" assumes incorrectly: truth is ghost uses your own Actions minutes, for your own workflows/ghost boxes, on your own GH account, accessible only by your own SSH identity. I reject your mistaken frame.
keepamovin 6mo ago
Wow, this was really a cathartic thread. Was it as good for you as it was for me?
sikozu 6mo ago
The repository has been disabled by GH. https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  Yes, the repos are currently disabled after folks here flagged/reported to GH. I'm grateful GH restores once they get to looking at it. Probably some abuse of the flag/report link on GH for ghost: some mistaken about what ghost is, some reacting to the possibility of widespread realization you can do your "secure agentic" workflows on your own free GH minutes rather than on the flaggers' secret sauce startups in the "AI isolation"/ephemeral machines space. And osme, I guess were just following the crowd. You did fixate on disabling the repo in your comments here yourself.
keepamovin 5mo ago
[dead]
keepamovin 5mo ago
Much Ado about Hamnet's Ghost It's hilarious that some highly responsible folks thought I was stealing from the free tier to enrich myself when in reality I built those people a command line app to make their own free tier more useful for them. Almost as if their minds, unable to conceive of my generosity, went to the first thing they would do, which, at least for now - cost them the utility of the actual thing I built. So quick to judge, but incorrectly, aye. And at a cost to themselves, so karmic. People dressed their panic in low-effort misreading and misleading about GH's terms. The useful frame here is what GH itself states Actions is for: GH's own quickstart describes Actions as CI/CD plat for automating "build, test and deployment" pipes, not just one thing.[0] [0]: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/get-started/quickstart https://docs.github.com/en/actions/get-started/quickstart Their product terms describe it more broadly as enabling "custom SDLC workflows" in a repo, usage billed.[1] [1]: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-for-additional-products-and-features https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... The same restrict GH-runners from activity unrelated to "production, testing, deployment or publication" of the associated software project, and separately say Actions may be used to "develop and test" apps.[1] People cited acceptable use when in reality ghost doesn't "reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Service, use of the Service, or access to the Service" - it wraps the official gh (https://cli.github.com/ https://cli.github.com/) CLI to drive runner creation on your own account on your own Actions minutes, for your own workflows. It's pure devX. In other words, what ghost does in seconds you could do in an hour typing into your CLI with gh, and vim. Or minutes by asking an agent to do it. ghost just makes this reproducible, stable, safe and wraps it in a beautiful CLI, with cute branding and a useful config file. People also cited "any activity that places a burden on our servers, where that burden is disproportionate to the benefits provided to users (for example, don't use Actions as a content delivery network or as part of a serverless application, but a low benefit Action could be ok if it’s also low burden)" - when it's laughable/ludicrous to suggest that the miniscule amount of interactive runners people would create with ghost would be any fraction of a fraction of a % of GitHub's global Action fleet, even if used widely. And even if it were, it's bounded by the person's own GitHub Actions minutes. Actions is running 24/7 pumping out heavy build workflows, thrashing network/disk and CPU to install deps and crunch tests. An interactive runner that you SSH into, and even run agent on for test/debug/dev/build actually a very light-weight use of the same infra - well below the average automated baseload. Some may fear that this would enable people to mine cryptocurrency on Actions runners. Lol - if folks desperately wanted to break the GH terms by doing that, what's to stop them doing that already with a workflow? If they do it using the gh CLI does that make it okay? Or does that make gh CLI responsible? If they use vim to edit the workflow file, is vim responsible? If they do it on Acer, is Acer responsible? Is NVIDIA responsible if they use a GPU? ghost doesn't magically make that easier - it's still just workflows. This fear is not a risk ghost introduces. Some mentioned "using free-tier Actions compute via Tor tunnels and SSH" - you mean, exactly what tmate (https://github.com/marketplace/actions/debugging-with-tmate https://github.com/marketplace/actions/debugging-with-tmate) enables? Are these people really claiming that one can't interact (using a human or an agent) with a runner? That's precisely what GH Actions already permits and promotes, and is what ghost enables - ghost just makes it more reliable, secure and useful. Some probably imagine something nefarious misunderstanding the technical decisions. So let's discuss technicals: Why not just use tmate? Tmate flakes out, is not real SSH, uses its own tunnel (trust). I don't dislike tmate, and it's good for easy setup, but if you can abstract away setup (precisely what ghost does) behind a config that the CLI applies, you don't have to worry about outsourcing making setup easy. ghost figured out the hard parts of using real SSH. What is "real SSH"? Here that means "agent forwarding" works. What is "agent forwarding"? Agent forwarding is SSH acting on the remote machine with the identity you have locally without moving keys there. This is both more secure, and more useful than what tmate does because you can clone to that remote whatever you can clone locally. That's why ghost uses real OpenSSH so you can agent forward your local identities and clone as if you're on your own machine. This agent forwarding is also great for additional safety when running agents - run them on the remote, in a stable environment, with only what you want, without accessing your device. It's pure win. Why tor tho? Well, you can't just SSH into a runner as there's no public IP, so you need a tunnel. ghost uses CloudFlare as the primary tunnel. Tmate uses its own servers. ghost answers the question with a focus on security and reliability: how to remove the dependency on a tunnel that one may not trust or doesn't control, or may flake? While CloudFlare is used to tunnel the SSH connection in ghost, in practice CloudFlare free tier sometimes may be unavailable or flake out, so tor is there as a backup. You can tunnel SSH over tor, and tor is slow but very reliable and resilient acorss all kind of CGNAT and other difficult networking setups. CloudFlare provides the first pass, tor provides the reliable backup. ghost falls over to using tor to tunnel SSH access when CloudFlare free tunnels are not working. People may think I'm a genius who somehow figured out how to do something "Actions doesn't allow" - but while the genius is probably true, there's no need to flatter ghost or me so much - it enables nothing beyond what Actions already does - it just makes it easier to use. 1000% simple sentence: ghost just provides a better interface to Actions. That is it. Are people mad they didn't think of doing that? yet, people went mad with righteous abuse-laden ranting. Almost as if the protective instincts one should direct towards protecting children or a family were somehow unexpressed - and looking for an outlet - leapt at the first chance to grab a pitchfork and the safety of the crowd's cover to legitimise the will to lash out - albeit with keyboards and reporting of repos. Ah, modern life so satisfying to the innate desires...lol It's worth noting that in response to the crowd panic "stampede" of "reporting" the repo, GH disabled access within 90 minutes of the HN post. I trust that if GitHub/Microsoft does review the actual project they'll see the crowd's panic was wrong, that ghost is good and useful and the repos shall be re-enabled.

126 points by keepamovin 6mo ago

Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago

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!

keepamovin 6mo ago
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.

anonymouscaller 6mo ago

Couldn't get it working on MacOS or Linux: $ curl -fsSL https://www.ghost.charity/install.sh https://www.ghost.charity/install.sh | bash Checking for Ghostbox updates... curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 404 Could not fetch ghost-linux-x64.tar.gz from https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases/releases/latest/download/ghost-linux-x64.tar.gz https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases/releases/late...

gbraad 6mo ago
Perhaps removed? "There are spare machines everywhere. GitHub Actions is only the first place ghosts come from." ... seems a bit odd.
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  No, it runs on your own gh account, so - not "odd" as you think - instead, clever and useful.
keepamovin 6mo ago
Should work fine now. REpo was not public at first.

throwa356262 6mo ago

@keepamovin this looks cool, but notice that your README and github links are ghosting us (404)

keepamovin 6mo ago
Thanks. I posted and really didn't expect any points. So checking back after 40 minutes and seeing it blown up was quite a shock. I'm working through all the things people have pointed out!

colesantiago 6mo ago

Its great that this is free for disposable use. We need more of these. There are too many sandboxes that charge insane prices. Curious what this runs on though and it would be great if this was completely open source. Great work!

jetbalsa 6mo ago
I know a guy who gets a bunch of old hardware as a recycler, We made the Shell On Demand Appliance for DEFCON[1] awhile back and would love to expand it, but power/internet would just cost too much. we have the hardware and software to do this. just not the long term recurring [1] https://forum.defcon.org/node/246908 https://forum.defcon.org/node/246908
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  This is interesting. A quick calculation with AI suggests pricing for cents/core/GB/hour suggests cost for power+net is 0.5cent/core/GB/hour assuming "average load" (web browsing, installing packages). Or in otherwords ~$3.60 a month for a "tiny machine" on this load 24/7. I'm guessing with actual "per human" usage the cost per person is 10 - 30x lower. So you can serve 1000 people for free a month if you have $300 to pay for power/net. I took this further and developed a table of breakeven and profit costs for different user sizes: Total Users | Tiny Machines (15× / 25×) | Residential Cost/mo | Colo Cost/mo | Break-even Paying @ $3/mo | Profit Factor @ 10% pay ----------- | ------------------------- | ------------------- | --------------- | ------------------------- | ----------------------- 100 | 7 / 4 | $14 – $25 | $20 – $35 | 5 – 12 | 0.86× – 2.08× 1,000 | 67 / 40 | $144 – $241 | $200 – $335 | 48 – 112 | 0.90× – 2.08× 10,000 | 667 / 400 | $1,440 – $2,401 | $2,000 – $3,335 | 480 – 1,112 | 0.90× – 2.08× 1,000,000 | 66,667 / 40,000 | $144k – $240k | $200k – $333k | 48k – 111k | 0.90× – 2.08× All figures use May 2026 US averages (EIA power rates + CBRE wholesale colo data); power+internet only. Profit factor is if exactly 10 % of all users pay the $3/month tier, how many times does the revenue cover your total power + internet cost? My gut says these prices are still 20-30% too high at the mid-high end tho.

fhn 6mo ago

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.

Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
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.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases https://web.archive.org/web/20260501150640/https://github.co...
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  The clean devX and minimalism of exe.dev definitely inspire by design for the ghost CLI. Essentially seeing exe.dev (which is a wholly different model, it's their own system - this is a local CLI tool you use to drive your GH account workflows), was the trigger for me to think "I should build this thing I've wanted for a long time". It's basically an improved gh CLI with a focus on real human-and-agent debugging and coding workflows on CI/multi-OS and infra, but written in a way where GH Actions doesn't have to be the backend - it's just the one I most use.
keepamovin 6mo ago
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).
keepamovin 5mo ago
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cobertos 6mo ago

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.

rvz 6mo ago
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.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  I think there's a case for self-hosted runners, and right now it only supports the basic ubuntu, macos and window latest. But I see a path to adding the larger paid runners as part of the toml for machine shape in future.
keepamovin 6mo ago
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 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.

rao-v 6mo ago

Is there a meaningfully useful version of automatically write to an encrypted disk / RAM that could be used with a random cloud instance? Obviously the decryption key would be in RAM somewhere but as a short term best practice it might be somewhat useful

keepamovin 6mo ago
That specialized. I think on GH at least the runner you get is random and opaque to you? For encryption you could add a user-script to the ghost config, it supports that.

pvitz 6mo ago

Segfault provides something similar with a direct ssh connection: https://www.thc.org/segfault/ https://www.thc.org/segfault/

keepamovin 6mo ago
That's cool, thanks for sharing that.

rvz 6mo ago

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. [0] https://www.ghost.charity/terms https://www.ghost.charity/terms

keepamovin 6mo ago
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.

D2OQZG8l5BI1S06 6mo ago

Weird to have a .charity TLD but promote abusing Github Actions as free compute.

sikozu 6mo ago
That's so weird.
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  No. Weird is people lying about it then flagging the repo until GH auto-disables. Almost as if somebody didn't want folks to discover you can do your ephemeral-machine agentic/human dev workflows on your own GH Action free minutes rather than paying like Tilde.run, Fly.io etc. How weird indeed
CodesInChaos 6mo ago
Volunteering the money of others is a favourite human pastime.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  Ghost provides a configuration and a way to spin up tiny machines from your CLI, but designed in a way where GitHub Actions doesn’t have to be the backend. It’s the same effect as running gh create-repo, setting a workflow, and gh run workflow (gh is the official GH CLI). You can do the same with tmate and gh from the CLI now, this just has better devX and uses real SSH so you can agent forward to clone your repos like you would locally. It is not “abusing” GH Actions nor “promote” that, nor “volunteering the money of others” (?), it is helping you use the Actions minutes on your account better. For me it makes GH Actions, which I’ve always loved, way more useful, by saving time in the setup of these common workflows I use all the time: debugging a failure in CI. Getting an agent to iterate directly in the CI machine. Manual build and smoke on different OS, etc. I had this idea for a while and was waiting for GH or someone to release an easier CLI for this, for a year or two, but they didn’t so I built it myself.
- cotti 6mo ago

kitchi 6mo ago

Looks like the Github repo has already been nuked, I'm guessing for violating ToS on Github actions?

simple10 6mo ago
The website has a broken github link. Repo is here https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases but it's only a README.md with binary releases. No public source code?
- mbreese 6mo ago
  The readme says it’s proprietary code that’s free to use during a “preview”. Odd to be so tied to GitHub for proprietary code.
  - rithdmc 6mo ago
    GitHub is one of the most readily accessible sources of parasitic compute resources.
    - keepamovin 5mo ago
      "Parasitic compute" is strange way to describe "a user running dev workflows on their own GitHub Actions allocation" when you run ghost, it creates a "ghostbox" - an ephemeral machine on your GitHub account, on your GitHub actions minutes, accessible only by your SSH identity. It's orchestration around GitHub's infra. Proprietary software built on GitHub is not exactly an unusual category.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
- ktm5j 6mo ago
  Yeah this seems pretty sketch.. I would not run that binary.

peter_d_sherman 6mo ago

An interesting set of ideas! The broader concept seems to be "ephemeral environments", which is related to sandboxing, which is in turn is related to testing/debugging... Related: https://github.com/topics/ephemeral-environments https://github.com/topics/ephemeral-environments https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/state_harmful.pdf https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/state_harmful.p...

keepamovin 6mo ago
Yes, that's about the shape of it, thanks! By controlling variables of the env (ie removing, fixing confounding factors), you can approach a more scientific process to development and testing, and make more rapid progress toward stability :)

6r17 6mo ago

I'd be worry about security tbf - this sounds cool until it's used to host some weird shenanigans and nobody has any kind way to tell who did what

keepamovin 5mo ago
Well it's linked to your GH account, and surely GH has logs of all the workflows that get run, so it's the same as regular Actions.

sbuas 6mo ago

Where is the source ? This looks fishy, no way I'll run this bin..

keepamovin 6mo ago
It ain't open source. You're free not to run closed-source software (tho OS/apps might be an issue ;)), but "closed source"/proprietary is 0 evidence of bad intent. And (sad but true) "open source" is 0% evidence of goodness - as the whole industry of "supply chain attack protection" can enthusiastically attest. Just so you know, in building this I ran hundreds of rust crates dozens of times on my personal laptop. In building BrowserBox I've run millions of times npm packages. ghost is actually a thing that helps with this risk - precisely because it provides isolated hybride (CI/automated + human in the loop/AI) dev flows, easily on your existing GH Actions minutes. Free minutes! (Thanks GH <3). How does it help? Because it's an isolated machine. Not even your ssh key is on it (SSH agent forwarding), but you can clone your repos and run CI/builds/dev/agents, and even gate secrets using GH's existing surface for this. It's a goto way to do dev securely - and protect against the very thing you (and many) falsely suspect ghost of. A paradox! But also a great opportunity to discuss where ghost helps - with the precise thing ppl mistook as doing. :) If you're super concerned - do a "ghost bootstrap" - create a workflow that creates a machine with a shape you want and add's tmate. Use tmate to ssh in. Download ghost, create an ssh key, add it as a deploy key to a repo you want to work on (if wf is not already in that repo), and then ssh into the ghost machine from your other runner machine (which could also be a VPS from "trad cloud", just sayin). Think about it: why would I spend 10+ years developing software in the open (see my GH: https://github.com/crisdosaygo https://github.com/crisdosaygo) and building a business on (primarily) security/browsing products only to throw it all away to do whatever it is people are imagining here? Think about it. Why would I steal anything from anyone? So sell a secret? To access a private repo? From some rando? How profitable could that be? It sounds ridiculous. And most important for me: I never have, am not, and would never do because I'm not a bad person. None of the fear makes sense: it's all totally unjust to level that at me in any way.

o10449366 6mo ago

As unreliable as GitHub actions are, this is what ruins nice things (free for public repos) for the rest of us.

keepamovin 6mo ago
I have never encountered any Actions reliability besides occasional networking stalls halting package installations. Actions has been so reliable that's what inspired me to make this. It's literally my go to test and develop platform. And I've used 10,000s of action minutes a month for a couple years on corp and personal plans.
keepamovin 5mo ago
"You dislike this use of Actions" is not the same thing as "this ruins nice things." Ghostbox uses the your own GitHub account and Actions minutes for development workflows.

beardsciences 6mo ago

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.

keepamovin 5mo ago
I appreciate your "great in concept" part. ghost aligns with ToS: it's a CLI porcelain driving the user’s own GitHub account to use Actions minutes for their own dev workflows. There was abuse on this thread tho - not just the fake accusations against ghost and me, but people abusing the GH flag/report button on its repos, leading to them being auto-disabled. I trust GH will restore it once they look at it. In the meantime - if there’s a specific clause you think applies, you're welcome to share. I think it's a classic case of crowd madness.

orliesaurus 6mo ago

Things like this are the reason why companies like GitHub then put everything under a paid tier.

rvz 6mo ago
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.
- S0y 6mo ago
  Do you realize how disastrous it would be for the open-source ecosystem to remove actions from the free tier?
  - nvme0n1p1 6mo ago
    Yeah, I can't imagine if open source maintainers had to pay for their own laptop, food, electricity, housing, transportation, or compute time.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6mo ago
      They might have to figure out running CI on their own hardware. The horror.
  - zbentley 6mo ago
    Open source developers got along perfectly well before free GHA compute. It hasn’t been around for that long.
keepamovin 6mo ago
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.

toraway 6mo ago

I wish the link for "Global Free Tier" [1] included an actual list of the free tiers GhostBox is using (ideally also including some kind of table/rubric for comparisons and any limitations, benefits, etc unique to each). It sounds like Github Actions is the first choice, if it's unavailable (or if Github blocks GhostBox in the future), are each of the alternatives viable as a more or less drop-in replacement? Or would there be loss of functionality? Those are the questions I had when reading through the site so I think some basic technical docs would go a long way to help people understand the project and decide to give it a try. I like the cute/whimsical branding but I'll admit to doing a little internal eye-roll when I clicked that link expecting technical specifics and instead read: > GitHub Actions is only the first place ghosts come from. There are strange little pockets of temporary compute all over the internet. Ghostbox makes them feel like one small machine. It's a neat idea though, and I've definitely had moments where I wished I could just spin up a free, temporary VM/container to do something but didn't feel like researching the current free-tier landscape and filling out a sign-up form and stuff. [1] https://www.ghost.charity/#gft https://www.ghost.charity/#gft

bensyverson 6mo ago
Yeah, I'm open to this concept, but I'm a little hesitant to clone a private repo somewhere random and undisclosed and then inject secrets.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  ghost creates 1 private special repo in your account, as a unified home to hold your config and runners for all your projects - it doesn't create a repo somewhere else and doesn't need any random secrets. If you do want to customize the config and add secrets tho, ghost does support that - put their names in the toml and it will wire them through for up.
keepamovin 6mo ago
Right now it's only GitHub Actions. I didn't want to overbuild in case it wasn't a thing for others. I mostly use Actions myself. But I'm open to adding more. I think the GFT is real.

sikozu 6mo ago

GitHub is going to love this. No wonder Actions keeps getting worse and worse.

keepamovin 5mo ago
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.

archargelod 6mo ago

Was this botted to the top of the front page? AI=generated article that asks you to download and run some random binary. Github account is just more AI slop. Everything to me just screams that it's a malware. Or this is normal here?

saltyoldman 6mo ago
botted, probably teampcp doing it's usual scams.
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  You're completely mistaken about the architecture, lol. ghost is not some payload running inside your Actions pipeline. It's a local client-side CLI that orchestrates your GH account to configure ephemeral dev boxes for interactive and agentic work: debugging, building, testing. Just like on your local box, but in a clean slate, safe, reproducible machine. I actually had to go look up who TeamPCP even was, so I definitely need to clear up this wild misunderstanding. The irony of this whole thread is incredibly thick. By using ghost, developers are doing exactly what security professionals recommend! If you want to test a sketchy npm package or let an AI coding agent run wild, doing it in an isolated, ephemeral GitHub Actions runner (where your SSH keys are safely agent-forwarded, not stored) is 100x safer than running it on your local MacBook where your real AWS keys and passwords live. I literally built a utility that protects you against supply chain attacks by giving you safe, disposable sandboxes on demand. And the crowd here, 'spooked' by recent news which I wasn't even aware of, lol, too innocent -- is projecting their panic onto it and accusing ghost of being the exact thing it defends against. Truly a classic case of crowd madness. I was just happily building a better CLI to do my dev work while y'all were out here writing spy novels.
keepamovin 6mo ago
[dead]
justsomedudeguy 6mo ago
or were the 'defend-microsoft' comments botted by AI, while the upvotes are organic? It's gotta be one or the other...

croemer 6mo ago

None of the links to Github work because you're pointing at the main branch instead of your default branch ghosts-only

keepamovin 6mo ago
I appreciate the catch. Will change it. edit: should be good now.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

aleksiy123 6mo ago

[dead]

arm32 6mo ago

Just shut this down.

keepamovin 5mo ago
No. It's useful - AI workflows are the future. Actions is perfect.

skywhopper 6mo ago

Nice way to automate the unethical destruction of the commons. Shared space and community standards are for suckers.

keepamovin 6mo ago
You're mistaken - ghost is not a service consuming actions for itself - it's a CLI tool you run locally to drive workflows with sane default configs so you can easily drop into them and continue working or debugging in reliable and consistent infra, or have your agent do it. It is a better CLI for GH workflows (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982915), now whatever you were imagining. What did you imagine it was?
keepamovin 5mo ago
Calling it "unethical destruction of the commons" does not make it so. Ghostbox helps a you run dev workflows in your own GitHub account, using your own Actions minutes.

S0y 6mo ago

This is 100% against githubs TOS lol. Some years ago I toyed with the idea of running a minecraft server inside github actions, I used tailscale to create a public endpoint and saved the world in an artifact that was re-loaded on the next run. It worked really well, but the point was never to actually use it for real.

keepamovin 6mo ago
No, these are dev machines you use for your software building, so it's not.
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  Extra clarity: ghost creates boxes/runners for you, on your own Actions minutes, that only you can access.
justsomedudeguy 6mo ago
Different companies and websites will very often have TOS's that contradict each other. TOS is contract law, so any single TOS only represents that one company's interests.

ctrlmeta 6mo ago

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?

croes 6mo ago
Like social media vibe coding doesn’t change people. It just makes their character more obvious
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  You can criticize the idea. You don't get to invent my motives nor my character, you have no idea about me at all, and you're totally 100% wrong about me, that's it. If you have a criticism of ghost, make it. Otherwise you're just doing deluded moral posturing. Bye
keepamovin 6mo ago
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 https://github.com/crisdosaygo/ghostbox-home-reveal
- 6mo ago

beardsciences 6mo ago

The repository now appears to be disabled. https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases https://github.com/crisdosaygo/ghostbox-home-reveal https://github.com/crisdosaygo/ghostbox-home-reveal

keepamovin 6mo ago
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.

dmsmb 6mo ago

gh will have to tighten controls or even completely stop providing free minutes. And then the whole community will cry about MS ruining gh. No folks, this is an infrastructure abuse and it will have net negative impact on most fair users

keepamovin 6mo ago
That's a claim, not anything else. Yelling abuse doesn't make it so. Ghostbox helps a human or agent run dev flows in their own (the human's) GitHub account, using their own Actions mins.

avaer 6mo ago

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.

keepamovin 6mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982915

everyos_ 6mo ago

This is why we can't have nice things. I sure hope this doesn't result in GH disabling actions for everyone. Also somebody should Ghidra the project, see if they can find malware. I'm not saying anyone has to, just a thought

keepamovin 5mo ago
You are free not to run binaries you don’t trust. You are not free to launder a malware accusation through innuendo. "This is why we can’t have nice things" assumes incorrectly: truth is ghost uses your own Actions minutes, for your own workflows/ghost boxes, on your own GH account, accessible only by your own SSH identity. I reject your mistaken frame.

keepamovin 6mo ago

Wow, this was really a cathartic thread. Was it as good for you as it was for me?

sikozu 6mo ago

The repository has been disabled by GH. https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases

keepamovin 6mo ago
Yes, the repos are currently disabled after folks here flagged/reported to GH. I'm grateful GH restores once they get to looking at it. Probably some abuse of the flag/report link on GH for ghost: some mistaken about what ghost is, some reacting to the possibility of widespread realization you can do your "secure agentic" workflows on your own free GH minutes rather than on the flaggers' secret sauce startups in the "AI isolation"/ephemeral machines space. And osme, I guess were just following the crowd. You did fixate on disabling the repo in your comments here yourself.

keepamovin 5mo ago

[dead]

keepamovin 5mo ago

Much Ado about Hamnet's Ghost It's hilarious that some highly responsible folks thought I was stealing from the free tier to enrich myself when in reality I built those people a command line app to make their own free tier more useful for them. Almost as if their minds, unable to conceive of my generosity, went to the first thing they would do, which, at least for now - cost them the utility of the actual thing I built. So quick to judge, but incorrectly, aye. And at a cost to themselves, so karmic. People dressed their panic in low-effort misreading and misleading about GH's terms. The useful frame here is what GH itself states Actions is for: GH's own quickstart describes Actions as CI/CD plat for automating "build, test and deployment" pipes, not just one thing.[0] [0]: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/get-started/quickstart https://docs.github.com/en/actions/get-started/quickstart Their product terms describe it more broadly as enabling "custom SDLC workflows" in a repo, usage billed.[1] [1]: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-for-additional-products-and-features https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... The same restrict GH-runners from activity unrelated to "production, testing, deployment or publication" of the associated software project, and separately say Actions may be used to "develop and test" apps.[1] People cited acceptable use when in reality ghost doesn't "reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Service, use of the Service, or access to the Service" - it wraps the official gh (https://cli.github.com/ https://cli.github.com/) CLI to drive runner creation on your own account on your own Actions minutes, for your own workflows. It's pure devX. In other words, what ghost does in seconds you could do in an hour typing into your CLI with gh, and vim. Or minutes by asking an agent to do it. ghost just makes this reproducible, stable, safe and wraps it in a beautiful CLI, with cute branding and a useful config file. People also cited "any activity that places a burden on our servers, where that burden is disproportionate to the benefits provided to users (for example, don't use Actions as a content delivery network or as part of a serverless application, but a low benefit Action could be ok if it’s also low burden)" - when it's laughable/ludicrous to suggest that the miniscule amount of interactive runners people would create with ghost would be any fraction of a fraction of a % of GitHub's global Action fleet, even if used widely. And even if it were, it's bounded by the person's own GitHub Actions minutes. Actions is running 24/7 pumping out heavy build workflows, thrashing network/disk and CPU to install deps and crunch tests. An interactive runner that you SSH into, and even run agent on for test/debug/dev/build actually a very light-weight use of the same infra - well below the average automated baseload. Some may fear that this would enable people to mine cryptocurrency on Actions runners. Lol - if folks desperately wanted to break the GH terms by doing that, what's to stop them doing that already with a workflow? If they do it using the gh CLI does that make it okay? Or does that make gh CLI responsible? If they use vim to edit the workflow file, is vim responsible? If they do it on Acer, is Acer responsible? Is NVIDIA responsible if they use a GPU? ghost doesn't magically make that easier - it's still just workflows. This fear is not a risk ghost introduces. Some mentioned "using free-tier Actions compute via Tor tunnels and SSH" - you mean, exactly what tmate (https://github.com/marketplace/actions/debugging-with-tmate https://github.com/marketplace/actions/debugging-with-tmate) enables? Are these people really claiming that one can't interact (using a human or an agent) with a runner? That's precisely what GH Actions already permits and promotes, and is what ghost enables - ghost just makes it more reliable, secure and useful. Some probably imagine something nefarious misunderstanding the technical decisions. So let's discuss technicals: Why not just use tmate? Tmate flakes out, is not real SSH, uses its own tunnel (trust). I don't dislike tmate, and it's good for easy setup, but if you can abstract away setup (precisely what ghost does) behind a config that the CLI applies, you don't have to worry about outsourcing making setup easy. ghost figured out the hard parts of using real SSH. What is "real SSH"? Here that means "agent forwarding" works. What is "agent forwarding"? Agent forwarding is SSH acting on the remote machine with the identity you have locally without moving keys there. This is both more secure, and more useful than what tmate does because you can clone to that remote whatever you can clone locally. That's why ghost uses real OpenSSH so you can agent forward your local identities and clone as if you're on your own machine. This agent forwarding is also great for additional safety when running agents - run them on the remote, in a stable environment, with only what you want, without accessing your device. It's pure win. Why tor tho? Well, you can't just SSH into a runner as there's no public IP, so you need a tunnel. ghost uses CloudFlare as the primary tunnel. Tmate uses its own servers. ghost answers the question with a focus on security and reliability: how to remove the dependency on a tunnel that one may not trust or doesn't control, or may flake? While CloudFlare is used to tunnel the SSH connection in ghost, in practice CloudFlare free tier sometimes may be unavailable or flake out, so tor is there as a backup. You can tunnel SSH over tor, and tor is slow but very reliable and resilient acorss all kind of CGNAT and other difficult networking setups. CloudFlare provides the first pass, tor provides the reliable backup. ghost falls over to using tor to tunnel SSH access when CloudFlare free tunnels are not working. People may think I'm a genius who somehow figured out how to do something "Actions doesn't allow" - but while the genius is probably true, there's no need to flatter ghost or me so much - it enables nothing beyond what Actions already does - it just makes it easier to use. 1000% simple sentence: ghost just provides a better interface to Actions. That is it. Are people mad they didn't think of doing that? yet, people went mad with righteous abuse-laden ranting. Almost as if the protective instincts one should direct towards protecting children or a family were somehow unexpressed - and looking for an outlet - leapt at the first chance to grab a pitchfork and the safety of the crowd's cover to legitimise the will to lash out - albeit with keyboards and reporting of repos. Ah, modern life so satisfying to the innate desires...lol It's worth noting that in response to the crowd panic "stampede" of "reporting" the repo, GH disabled access within 90 minutes of the HN post. I trust that if GitHub/Microsoft does review the actual project they'll see the crowd's panic was wrong, that ghost is good and useful and the repos shall be re-enabled.