As I understand it: If I start a project using hello-webpage, it will never have Node.js. If I want Node.js, I should start with hello-express.
Is there a way to add a runtime to a an existing container, rather than remixing from a base image which already has the given runtime?
Final example; I see you guys are working on a LAMP proof of concept, but is there any way that we ordinary users can do the same kinds of experiments within the console?
It’s still using Node.js on the back-end it’s just we handle the routing for you. If you add a package.json file to a hello-webpage project, you can ‘convert’ it to an hello-express by adding the modules you need. You’d also have to begin handling the routing yourself with Express or similar.
So long as it doesn’t require root, then you can do what you like. People have experimented with getting other things running on Glitch.
I’ve successfully got Elm working quite nicely, as its available on npm. I also had a go at ClojureScript with the Lumo compiler, and it worked but dependencies break. Others have got TypeScript going. Really I suspect most things that are available on npm will possibly work.
People have also done stuff with Python, I also noticed there’s Java 8 available on the container as well, so in theory you could use that, so long as you still used npm scripts to start your application. I thought about trying to get Clojure working that way, but I suspect you might run into memory and disk space issues though, as the containers are quite small and JVM apps are quite hungry beasts.