from Hacker News

How the itch.io app sandboxes games

by elisee on 7/1/16, 9:35 PM with 3 comments

  • by elisee on 7/1/16, 9:42 PM

    Context: http://itch.io/ is a place for publishing indie games and other creative stuff. There is no greenlight process like on Steam, people can share content very easily without gatekeepers.

    (Disclosure: I know the devs pretty well but I'm submitting because I think it's interesting content for the HN audience)

    They recently released a Steam-like app for browsing, installing & updating games. There's an awful lot of interesting stuff being done like https://itch.io/docs/butler/ (CLI tool for efficiently patching games with diffing for both upload & download).

    The latest feature they added is experimental sandboxing which allows transparently running the games you download from itch.io as a separate restricted user / in a jail. The submission link details the research done to make it work.

    More info here: https://itch.io/docs/itch/using/sandbox.html and https://github.com/itchio/itch/releases/tag/v18.0.0

  • by fasterthanlime on 7/1/16, 9:48 PM

    Hi! I'm Amos, the main developer behind the itch.io app. I'll check this thread for comments tomorrow, thanks for your attention!