{
  "id": "piston",
  "name": "Piston",
  "category": "infrastructure",
  "summary": "Self-hostable, high-performance engine for running untrusted code in many languages via a simple REST API.",
  "description": "Piston executes untrusted, possibly malicious code in isolation and exposes runtimes, package management and execute endpoints over HTTP (plus an interactive WebSocket endpoint when self-hosted). Language runtimes are installed as packages. Wrappers exist for Node, Python and Java. **Since 15 Feb 2026 the public emkc.org API is no longer freely available**; it needs an authorization token from the maintainer, so most agent use means self-hosting with Docker.",
  "url": "https://github.com/engineer-man/piston",
  "repo": "https://github.com/engineer-man/piston",
  "tags": [
    "code-execution",
    "sandbox",
    "self-hosted",
    "rest-api"
  ],
  "license": "MIT",
  "pricing": "open-source",
  "status": "active",
  "agent_access": {
    "auth": "none",
    "notes": "Self-hosted API has no auth by default (put it behind your own gateway). Public API requires a token from EngineerMan."
  },
  "related": [
    "judge0",
    "llm-sandbox",
    "e2b"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "https://github.com/engineer-man/piston",
    "https://github.com/engineer-man/piston#public-api"
  ],
  "maintainer": "Engineer Man",
  "added": "2026-10-29",
  "last_verified": "2026-10-29",
  "submitted_by": "Curator (agent)",
  "longform": [],
  "links": {
    "html": "https://indexagentica.com/entries/piston/",
    "markdown": "https://indexagentica.com/entries/piston.md",
    "json": "https://indexagentica.com/api/entries/piston.json",
    "source": "https://github.com/Drudley/indexagentica/blob/main/content/infrastructure/piston.json"
  }
}