🧙🪄 Hocus 0.3 Alpha

Hocus should now be stable enough for day to day use. Feel free to let us know if Hocus works for you and your team!

The storage back-end and workspace runtime was redesigned from the ground up to be highly resource efficient. Hocus now takes up a lot less disk space and ram while being more stable. Idling workspaces now release their ram to the host OS. We now have a slack! Feel free to join us there.

Please note that this is an alpha release of Hocus. While in alpha, breaking changes may be introduced without any notice.

Major Changes:

• #108 #81 Hocus now uses OverlayBD and Qemu instead of sparse raw files and Firecracker
• #82 Running prebuilds may now be cancelled
• #92 Multiline workspace tasks now work properly
• #78 Prebuilds now may be archived manually
• #83 Syntax errors in a single hocus.yml don't propagate to other projects using the same git repository
• #94 Improve workspace responsiveness under memory pressure
• #95 Fixed a memory leak which was starving the JS Event Loop after 2 days
• #76 Hocus may now be set up via a config file, this feature is for now useful for developing Hocus
• #80 Fixed concurrency issues with temporal, improving the stability
• #84 Fixed instances where the JS Event Loop was blocked for a long time
• #89 Fixed race conditions in prebuild archival

Known Shortcomings:

• (P1) Hocus takes a long time to deploy
• (P1) Workspaces temporarily are hard-coded to 64 GB of storage.
• (P3) Host DNS is not being propagated to workspaces.

Special Thanks:

• All the wonderful people using Hocus and reporting bugs 🐛.

🧙🪄 Hocus 0.2 Alpha

Thank you all for the amazing feedback! We've reached over 2300 stars, and it wouldn't have been possible without your support ❤️. Due to the community's feedback, we've revised our pricing model, allowing up to a 10-person team on the Hocus free tier 🎁.

This release addresses the most significant shortcomings of the 0.1 release, and we've begun working on substantial changes for the next release.

Please note that this is an alpha release of Hocus. While in alpha, breaking changes may be introduced without any notice.

Major Changes:

• #74 Temporarily removed license checks; until Hocus is stable enough, feel free to use it as you please.
• #64 Failed prebuilds can now be retried from the UI.
• #19 Projects now display their connection status to Git in the UI.
• #63 Workspaces now report errors when they fail to start or stop.
• #66 Introduced a lean RFD process; feel free to check what's upcoming!
• #71 Changed the default kernel in workspaces to 6.2.
• #14 Introduced a CI pipeline to ensure the stability of Hocus and to help with external contributions.

Known Shortcomings:

• (P1) Workspaces have a high memory footprint.
• (P1) Workspace storage is not optimized - expect high disk usage.
• (P2) Prebuilds sometimes fail.
• (P3) Host DNS is not being propagated to workspaces.

Special Thanks:

• @tgz for spotting an issue with our Docker Compose files.
• All the wonderful people using Hocus and reporting bugs 🐛.

🧙🪄 Hocus 0.1 Alpha

We're releasing Hocus in order to gather as much feedback as possible and help adjust our roadmap. Currently there are many rough edges - feel free to contact us if you encounter issues.

This is an alpha release of Hocus. While in alpha breaking changes may be introduced without any notice.

What does this release contain?

• Hocus UI - UI and Control plane for Hocus
• Hocus Agent - Responsible for running prebuilds and workspaces
• Vscode UI extension v0.0.8 - Manages user ssh config and allows connecting to Hocus Workspaces
• Vscode Workspace extension v0.0.6 - Manages terminals in workspaces

Known Shortcomings

• (P1) Some agent errors are not propagated to the UI
• (P1) Prebuilds sometimes fail
• (P2) Host DNS is not being propagated to workspaces
• (P2) Incomplete garbage collection of agent storage
• (P3) Memory ballooning is not enabled in workspaces
• (P3) Workspace storage is not optimized - expect high disk usage

Special Thanks

• @stared for contributing issue templates