Edge.js: Run Node apps inside a WebAssembly sandbox

https://wasmer.io/posts/edgejs-safe-nodejs-using-wasm-sandbox

by syrusakbary • 4 months ago

173 42 4 months ago

syrusakbary14• 4 months ago

Hi HN!

I'm Syrus, from Wasmer. We built Edge.js in a few weeks after different trials trying to bring Node.js to the Edge. We used AI and Codex heavily for this project, as otherwise the timeline would have spanned to a year plus to develop.

The summary of this announcement is that Edge.js:

  * Runs using WebAssembly when in `--safe` mode
  * It's fully compatible with Node.js (passing all their spec tests for non-VM modules)
  * It has a pluggable JS engine architecture: can work with V8, Javascript, SpiderMonkey, QuickJS, Hermes, etc.

Super happy to answer any questions you may have!

larsnystrom• 4 months ago

Maybe I’m just dense, but it says the fs module is fully supported, so what happens when I try to read a file from disk if the app is fully sandboxed?

syrusakbary14• 4 months ago

Only the current working directory will be exposed/mounted to the runtime (we do this to facilitate the DX when running local files without requiring the user to add extra flags).

As a fun exercise, you can try reading process.cwd() from edge in --safe mode and without it.

jonny_eh2• 4 months ago

* Runs using WebAssembly when in `--safe` mode

Why is safe mode opt-in?

Onavo• 4 months ago

What's the Next.js compatibility like?

syrusakbary14• 4 months ago

Edge.js is fully compatible with Next.js

gamebak• 4 months ago

noob question, but how can you create a localhost:3000 port, when ported to wasm, in the browser?

I think this is a cool demo for you to show, at least in my mind this might be a little mind blowing + maybe a db?

I know there are wasm dbs availble that are very light, but so that maybe it's a plus to consider.

gavinray• 4 months ago

Node does not run in a browser?

bhelx• 4 months ago

Just wanted to chime in to say this is really cool. I dreamed of building something like this for the Extism ecosystem but it was a huge lift to unlock all the pieces. This looks like lots of innovation all the way down the stack. Kudos!

syrusakbary14• 4 months ago

Thanks Ben! Took us a bit to figure out the best architecture for it, but once it became clear then it was just a matter of implementing the missing bits.

I think the fact that WASIX is much more mature now have helped to increase development speeds quite a bit!

alex_reg• 4 months ago

It's a bit confusing.

Roughly:

* a refactor of Node.js, but using a standardized API for JS engine interop * Integration with the Wasmer CLI so it will run JS with v8 but, everything else in Webassembly

Interesting idea.

Could be a much lighter weight way to sandbox JS...

syrusakbary14• 4 months ago

We are so deep into the weeds that sometimes is hard for us to realize that maybe we are not explaining in the best terms.

What was the most confusing thing in the blogpost? I'd like to polish a bit more to make it clearer! Thanks a lot!

giankam• 4 months ago

Hi Syrusakbary, I have to admit I still do not fully understand what this is.

First, I could not find usage examples on the edgejs.org page and the docs link points to the node docs, why?

If I head to github, there are some usage examples, but they confuse me more.

The first example: $ edge server.js led me to think that this is a node replacement that runs in a webassembly sandbox, so completely isolated. But why the need of --safe then? What's the difference between using it and not using it?

But the next examples creates more confusion to me: $ edge node myfile.js $ edge npm install $ edge pnpm run dev

What is this doing? I thought that edge was a node replacement, interpreting and running javascript files, but it's now running executables (node, npm)... what is that? What happens when I run npm install... where does it install files? What's the difference between running edge node myfile.js and edge myfile.js?

Hope this helps.

willquack• 4 months ago

Awesome project!

Dumb question: could you run this in frontend js using the browser's js engine and wasm environment similar to WebContainers? Maybe `fs` is just in-memory, and some things like forking are disabled. It'd be cool to have "nodejs" in the web!

syrusakbary14• 4 months ago

It’s not a dumb question at all.

And yes, it will allow running Node.js apps fully on the browser, in a way that’s more compatible than any other alternative!

Stay tuned!

moralestapia• 4 months ago

in a way that’s more compatible than any other alternative

I can see where that's going.

Awesome. I want to msg. you on LinkedIn but can't.

apignotti• 4 months ago

Do you have any specific test case that you would consider "very challenging" on the compatibility side? I'd be curious to check if BrowserPod can support that already.

yuri91• 4 months ago

I work on a project that does exactly that (and more): https://browserpod.io/.

Currently it supports Node, but we plan to add Python, Ruby, git, and more.

You can see it in action in this demo: https://vitedemo.browserpod.io

More info here: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/browserpod-10

Ah and kudos to Syrus and his team for this release. Edge.js's architecture seems to have many similarities with BrowserPod. I see it as proof that we are both going in the right direction!

syrusakbary14• 4 months ago

Thanks Yuri. Keep up the good work

MillionOClock2• 4 months ago

Very interesting! On what platforms can this run? If it can run on iOS, how would you handle attempts to access to the file system or networking, is this already wired in somehow? If not is it easy to add custom handlers to handle these actions?

syrusakbary14• 4 months ago

Yes, it could run in iOS (using JavascriptCore, V8 in jitless mode, or QuickJS), although we don't have a prototype app yet.

It should probably take a few hours with AI to get a demo for it :)

MillionOClock2• 4 months ago

Awesome! Are you planning on setting a license soon? I might have missed it but I don't see it on the GitHub repo.

pscanf• 4 months ago

Very cool project!

Question regarding the pluggable js engine: I have an electron app where I'm currently using QuickJS to run LLM-generated code. Would edge.js be able (theoretically) to use electron's v8 to get a "sanboxed within electron" execution environment?

cyanydeez• 4 months ago

naively, based on their install.sh script, you'd pick the correct edge.js executable and shell out to that. I'm sure there's some more integral means, but if you wanted a quick test, that should be easily setup.

syrusakbary14• 4 months ago

Yes, this should be fully possible.

We actually believe Edge.js will a great use case for LLM-generated code.

2001zhaozhao• 4 months ago

Huh. Could this be a way to sandbox user-generated JS in web apps?

pacman1337• 4 months ago

Not sure I understand the use cases. I'm guessing people want to run unsafe nodejs code. Either cloud providers like for lambdas or on personal computer for AI coding? On cloud why is this better than firecracker, firecrack can run any programming language this is just nodejs so already useless for that use case?

For personal computer, people worried about the spin up time of docker? I think that is more of a tooling issue where you spin up one instance and run multiple jobs.

What am I missing? What are actually real use cases where this would be better?

jsLavaGoat• 4 months ago

User lacks permissions to install "apps."

robjam2• 4 months ago

Wow! Node APIs in wasm(wasix)? Something that I have been thinking over for a long time is getting wasm (just wasm, not wasi or com) to be the unit of deployment/packaging for web apps like Nuxt/Next that only depend on, for example SQLite or Postgres. Slightly ignorant question, but would edge.js allow integrating with a caddy plug-in to handle serving the app from wasm?

I know of the extism project and played around with it in elixir, but I'm looking to have CF Workers DX with as little operational complexity as possible for many silly pet projects.

robjam2• 4 months ago

There's a lot of inspiring projects in the thread that I'm going to have to look over. This made my day.

actionfromafar• 4 months ago

Can that Node app load and run WebAssembly?

(A.K.A. are we IBM 360 yet?)

syrusakbary14• 4 months ago

Yes it can :)

ammmir• 4 months ago

I don't get it. You mention being able to choose your own JS engine, so it's not using Wasmer's WebAssembly implementation but that of the chosen JS engine's? In other words, can Edge.js use Wasmer? Or have you managed to compile V8/JSC into WebAssembly and are executing it with Wasmer? If so, amazing!

jonny_eh2• 4 months ago

I think it’s the latter

d0100• 4 months ago

I still prefer Deno because I don't need a separate npm install command, which makes running code that much easier

Being able to import from "https://my-vpn.com/mypackage@1.2.3" or "npm:package@1.2.3" and just running code without having to worry about scaffolding node_modules makes sandboxing code much easier

drewbitt• 4 months ago

Sick! Love me some Wasm solutions like this

huksley• 4 months ago

How to run it embeddable, i.e. can I load unsafe code in existing typescript codebase using it?

What is the lifecycle of the sandbox? Can we pause, step-by-step, pause and resume executed code?

Edge.js: Run Node apps inside a WebAssembly sandbox

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