Bitrise Remote Dev Environments - Cloud Macs your coding agents can actually build on
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Bitrise RDE gives you cloud Macs & Linux machines that start in seconds, the same machines, stacks and caches as your CI.
Give every agent its machine and run them in parallel via MCP, or attach VS Code, Cursor or Claude Code. Archive when you stop, restore later.
Replies
Heyday Health
Intriguing, congrats on the launch! Do you have anything preinstalled on VMs?
Bitrise
@flreln Thanks for checking RDE :)
Bitrise
@flreln On your question - Yes, and quite a lot.
The VMs are cloned from the same images our CI fleet runs, so on macOS you get Xcode with your choice of version, the iOS simulators and devices, and the usual tooling (Git, npm, fastlane).
On Linux you get Docker and the standard toolchain.
Caches are shared with Bitrise CI, so dependencies come down warm instead of from scratch. If you need something beyond that, you can customise a session with a few scripts or bake it into a template.
Bitrise
@flreln anything on top of that you might need?
Bitrise
@flreln oh yes, all tools are preinstalled that you typically need for software development.
And not just preinstalled, also updated. Pretty cool
Is it mainly faster builds or does the bigger benefit come from reducing manual testing and release work?
Bitrise
@new_user___209202627e87af67bf41b28 Great question! You could see benefits in both, but the main benefit comes earlier in the process. RDE speeds up development itself: you don't lose time configuring the environment, and each agent gets its own machine, so several can run at once.
Bitrise
@new_user___209202627e87af67bf41b28 mainly the advantage is that you don’t have to maintain your dev environments and can spin up multiple, in parallel and also restore them to start from a clean state. You can either code in them manually or just give it to an agent to code or debug or figure out something
Congrats team for reaching this great milestone!
Bitrise
@gkx2 thank you! we are also top 2 of the day so far!
Bitrise
@gkx2 can’t be more excited to see how Customers will start using it
Hey, member of the Bitrise docs team here 📝
First of all, congrats! 🎉 And a quick question about templates for iOS.
How much of an existing Bitrise setup carries over (thinking stack, connected repo, workspace secrets) versus needing to be defined again for RDE? And where does code signing land: are certs and profiles part of the template? Or something you set up per session?
(Okay, this is a COUPLE of quick questions 😬)
Bitrise
@ilana_zholobovsky1 hello Ilana 👋 Thank you so much for your support :)
Bitrise
@ilana_zholobovsky1 Stacks carry over directly, an RDE session runs the same stack image as your CI and Build Hub builds, and stays pinned to it.
Bitrise
@ilana_zholobovsky1 Listing the answers:
Stacks: you can use the same stacks, with the same pre-installed tools.
Connected repo: RDEs today are personal, meaning if you create an RDE others won't have access to it. Currently this means that your own GitHub account will be used, the one you connected with your Bitrise account, and so you'll have access to the repos your (connected GH) account has access to. Alternatively you can generate a GH token and set it as an Input.
Workspace secrets: currently those aren't available for RDEs, but this is definitely a great idea! We wanted to start with the most secure option, which is the RDE only has access to secrets / inputs you specify - either manually or automatically - but we'll definitely iterate on this.
Code signing: similarly, code signing files aren't automatically available for RDEs, but you can define them as inputs, or sign in e.g. to Xcode inside the RDE.
Bitrise
@ilana_zholobovsky1 @viktorbenei thanks, Vikor. Sometimes I'm so sad that I'm not a develoepr to answer on all of those question :)
Bitrise
@ilana_zholobovsky1 @lisadziuba I'm always happy to answer tech questions :D
@viktorbenei @lisadziuba thank you both :)
Jinna.ai
Interesting project! What do you use to virtualize sessions on Mac? Wondering from the standpoint of executing browser-based tasks — wondering will it fire anti-bot protection on websites due to virtualization.
Bitrise
@nikitaeverywhere, thanks for your feedback 🙏 Very interesting question, let me check with my team 😀
@nikitaeverywhere Bitrise has its own virtualization, an implementation of the official Apple Virtualization Framework, running standard MacOS
Bitrise
@nikitaeverywhere @radgab Gabor, thanks for helping with the context. I couild not reply this one
Bitrise
@nikitaeverywhere RDE is built with Apple’s native Hypervisor and Virtualization Framework. To the outside world the browser session will look exactly the same as if it was run natively from your laptop. The bot detection will have to pick on the behavior, will not know in what exact environment the browser is running from. Overall this is an increasing problem in the industry, but unrelated to RDE
ProdShort
@lisadziuba Congrats on going live! I’m wondering how easy is to to launch VMs/cloud Mac? Do I need to register account or can I can try it without registration?
Bitrise
@amraniyasser hey Amrani! Thanks for checking Bitrise Remote Dev Environments 💜
Bitrise
@amraniyasser 😀 You do need an account, there's no anonymous try-it-now mode. Signup gets you a two-week trial: 8 hours per OS, one VM at a time, and a card at signup for verification only, we don't charge it.
After that it's quick. Easiest path is the CLI, one command creates a session and drops you into it. There's also the web UI if you'd rather click through it and use the built-in terminal. You can check our Quickstart guide
Bitrise
@amraniyasser https://docs.bitrise.io/en/bitrise-rde/getting-started/quickstart
ProdShort
@lisadziuba Thanks a lot for your answers !! Amazing 🙏🚀 congrats again
It seems, I don't have to upgrade my laptop anymore. Thank you! :)
Bitrise
@daniel_bodnar91 lol :) you don't have to!
Bitrise
@daniel_bodnar91 or buy 5 if you want to run 5 agents in parallel 😆
Bitrise
@daniel_bodnar91 @arpadk where would anyone put 5 laptops? you need to have a wework for that :) lol
What a day! Big congrats on the launch 🚀
Bitrise
@ka_4 thank you :) pls share RDe with all mobile devs you know :)
Bitrise
@ka_4 let’s gooooo!! Thank you 😊
I would like to know which testing problems teams usually struggle with most.
Bitrise
@amybradley hey Amy
Would you mind sharing what problems are you reffering to?
Bitrise
@amybradley mostly mobile app sim/emulator testing. Can be flaky, slow. There is a lot of development in this area now to improve
Can I use VS Code on my local computer while actually developing on the remote VM? Basically, can I connect my local VS Code directly to the virtual machine and work there as if it were local?
Bitrise
@daniel_bodnar91 sorry missed your comment
Bitrise
@daniel_bodnar91 Yes. You keep VS Code on your laptop and connect it to the session over SSH, so the editor stays local and everything else (build, tests, simulators) runs on the VM. Cursor and JetBrains work the same way. We also have a native Bitrise VS Code plugin coming that opens a repo straight into a new session, but you don't need to wait for it.
Bitrise
@daniel_bodnar91 exactly!