# engineer-man/piston

A high performance general purpose code execution engine.

Repository: https://github.com/engineer-man/piston
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/engineer-man-piston
Homepage: https://emkc.org/run
Language: JavaScript
License: MIT
License Family: permissive
Topics: lxc, piston, code-execution, shell, nodejs
Last push: 2026-07-31T15:06:41+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 66/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 95, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 2905, "days_push": 33, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 2796, forks 466 (observed 2026-08-28T04:07:22.356750+00:00)

## What it is
Piston is a high performance general purpose code execution engine that safely runs untrusted and potentially malicious code in isolated environments. It exposes a public API and powers web IDEs, Discord bots, and 200+ integrations for arbitrary code evaluation.

## Use cases
- run untrusted user-submitted code safely
- build an online code execution API for a web IDE
- evaluate code snippets in a Discord bot
- execute code in many programming languages from one service
- self-host a sandboxed code runner
- power coding challenge and contest platforms

## When to choose
- you need to execute arbitrary code from users in a sandboxed way
- you want a single API supporting many languages
- you are building an online judge, playground, or code-eval bot
- you need a self-hosted alternative to hosted code execution services

## When to avoid
- you only need to run your own trusted code
- you need heavy GPU or long-running compute workloads
- you cannot host Linux containers or LXC environments
- you need per-user persistent state across executions

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: active
- function: http-server, api-framework, security, cli
- domain: developer-tools, apis, security, self-hosted
- platform: self-hosted
- tags: code-execution, sandbox, untrusted-code, lxc, online-judge, code-evaluation, nodejs, linux, docker, web-server

## Member repositories
- engineer-man/piston (main) score 66

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:22.356750+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:49:12.624342+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/engineer-man/piston (fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:22.356750+00:00, sha 92d4ea4186b7)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.