Maintained fork for BoxLite + Docker Compose self-hosting

[evertonstz]

Hey — just a heads-up that I made a fork of Netclode for my own self-hosting/deployment needs. The main difference is focusing on BoxLite + Docker Compose instead of the original K8s-oriented operational model (that was too heavy for my poormans server), while trying to stay compatible with the upstream client/control-plane contract where possible. I’m not expecting support from you; just wanted to let you know out of courtesy. If any pieces end up being generally useful (like #96 ), I may try to upstream them later!

[angristan]

I see you've continued iterating on it seems pretty cool, would love your thoughts on what you made it evolve into, I'm just curious about your usage :)

[evertonstz]

@angristan sorry for the delay, I have been working a lot lately 😄

Short version is that I took netclode and pointed it at a single machine. The k3s and Kata stack became docker compose up on one KVM box, with the microVM runtime linked into the control-plane binary through CGo (BoxLite) instead of orchestrated through a CRD and a full docker only backend to help development (specially for the agent image). Everything above that line, the proto surface, the Connect streams, the session state machine, the Redis event log, I barely touched. It kept working.

The biggest changes I did were probably:

1. Deployment. k3s, Kata, JuiceFS and the Ansible playbooks are gone. BoxLite covers about 60% of runtime interface, so I lost things: snapshots return ErrNotSupported, ExposePort is unimplemented so web previews don't work here at all, and the warm pool is force disabled. My cold start is a full image pull, then VM boot, then clone. Fine for one user, indefensible anywhere else.
2. Terminal. node-pty became zmx, so each terminal is a separate daemon process and survives agent restarts. On the client, SwiftTerm became libghostty. The renderer swap wasn't the interesting part though. The bug I was actually chasing is WorkspaceView switches on the selected tab, so tabbing away destroys the view and the terminal state with it. TerminalStore now owns long-lived bridges and the views only present them.
3. A Pi adapter, because I wanted to try adding a new harness.