Howdy HN! I'm Charles and I wanted to share something I am working on right now: gangway (https://gangway.sh/).

Gangway is a simple way to quickly spin up ephemeral containers for previews, demos, artifacts, and temporary sharing

This app has started months ago as an idea to take advantage of spare compute capacity I have and to keep some of my hosting costs down. Initially I tried PaaS apps such as Coolify and Dokku, but it didn't provide a way for me to quickly and easily distribute apps I write by hand. Then, I tried creating a few prototypes and failing due to them being overly complex or broad scoped.

What I landed on was built one feature at a time:

- PR previews - This provided immediate utility to me for my frontend work. I get to review my teams code without being woried about usage or billing

- UI to quickly spin up a preview environment - If I have something I want to show a client but it isn't ready to go live on their domain yet, I can drag in a folder, let gangway figure out how to run it, optionally protect it with a password then send them a personalized URL.

- MCP - I thought it would be even easier if I can have an LLM deploy the app at any time without much thought. I have used this to message and quickly remedy and preview a bug fix from my phone before it shipped out.

- Artifacts - After adding the MCP I realized I often wanted my agent to generate visualizations or previews of features before implementation. Claude users may recognize the general idea from Artifacts, except these can be full stack apps you control.

Some examples currently running on gangway, all created from short conversations with different agents:

- Paged at 2 am - a user flow for a web-app on a canvas: https://paged-at-2am.demo.gangway.sh

- A slide deck from one markdown file (an artifact): https://four-day-week.demo.gangway.sh

- Bottle Sea, a small Bun + Postgres app: https://bottle-sea.demo.gangway.sh

- Quickfire Trivia - multiplayer rooms: https://quickfire-trivia.demo.gangway.sh

- A black hole: https://event-horizon.demo.gangway.sh

- FLUX a multiplayer physics demo: https://flux.demo.gangway.sh

Install is a one-liner or a quick docker compose setup (https://github.com/charlesabarnes/gangway#quickstart), and there's a local-only mode with cloudflare quick tunnel links if you don't want to expose anything.

I am considering deploying a multi-tenant hosted version of this to make it even easier. Let me know of any feedback that you may have!