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CS50 Sandbox

Note

CS50 Sandbox will be decommissioned on July 1, 2023. A free alternative is Replit!

CS50 Sandbox is a web app at sandbox.cs50.io, for students and teachers especially, that allows users to

  • create temporary programming environments (sandboxes) quickly and
  • share copies of those sandboxes with others.

For instance, a teacher might

  • begin a class by asking students to visit sandbox.cs50.io and start a sandbox for C with a terminal window and text editor, with a file called hello.c, all of which the app's landing page facilitates,
  • provide students with a pre-configured link like https://sandbox.cs50.io/?file=hello.c&window=editor&window=terminal (perhaps shortened via a URL shortener) that, when visited, would yield the same, or
  • provide students with starter code, as by creating a sandbox, editing one or more files, and asking students to clone that sandbox by visiting its unique URL.

CS50 Sandbox is essentially a lightweight version of CS50 IDE, CS50's web-based integrated development environment, but CS50 Sandbox

To use CS50 Sandbox, students and teachers need only have a (free) GitHub account via which to log in.

API

CS50 Sandbox supports, via both GET and POST, these HTTP parameters:

  • cmd, which, if present, specifies the command to be run in the sandbox's terminal window (if not bash, the default).
  • file, which, if present, is a file path to pre-create within the sandbox in /root/sandbox. If window has a value of editor (potentially among other values), that file, if not binary, will also be pre-opened in the code editor.
  • window, which must have a value of terminal (so that the sandbox will have a terminal window) and may have additional values of
    • browser, in which case the sandbox will have an embedded browser, pre-configured with an address of http://localhost:8080/,
    • editor, in which case the sandbox will have a code editor, and/or
    • x, in which case the sandbox will have an embedded X window.

For GET, then, the shortest supported URL is https://sandbox.cs50.io/?window=terminal.

A URL with multiple values for window, meanwhile, might be https://sandbox.cs50.io/?window=editor&window=terminal.

Values of browser and x for window are mutually exclusive.

Unsupported parameterizations will yield an HTTP status code of 400.

When submitted via POST, each value of file can be an actual file encoded as multipart/form-data, as via a form like the below:

<form action="https://sandbox.cs50.io/" enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post">
    <input multiple name="file" type="file">
    <input name="window" type="hidden" value="editor">
    <input name="window" type="hidden" value="terminal">
    <input type="submit">
</form>

Related

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to CS50's friends at Google and Pluralsight for their support of this app!