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Show HN: DevPod – Codespaces but Open Source, Client-Only, and Unopinionated

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Show HN: DevPod – Codespaces but Open Source, Client-Only, and Unopinionated

#1

Post by gentele »

Hi everyone - Looking for feedback for this new open source project we launched. It's called DevPod and it's built on the devcontainer.json standard to create reproducible dev environments. It lets you spin up dev environments in any infra, kind of like a Terraform but for dev environments.

Compared to hosted services such as Github Codespaces, JetBrains Spaces, or Google Cloud Workstations, DevPod has the following advantages:

- Open Source: DevPod is 100% open-source and extensible. A provider doesn’t exist? Just create your own.

- Client-only: No need to install a server backend. DevPod runs solely on your computer.

- Cross IDE support: VS Code and the full JetBrains suite is supported. Other IDEs can be connected through ssh.

- Rich feature set: DevPod already supports prebuilds, auto inactivity shutdown, git & docker credentials sync, with many more features to come.

I've gotten tons of good feedback from folks here in the past for other OSS projects, so I'm hoping to get some thoughts on this new project today.

What do you think? Open for any feedback - even if you think DevPod sucks, let me know.

Show HN: DevPod – Codespaces but Open Source, Client-Only, and Unopinionated
github.com

Re: Show HN: DevPod – Codespaces but Open Source, Client-Only, and Unopinionated

#4

Post by gentele »

dmattia wrote: post #3

As someone who setup Codespaces + local devcontainer support for my company, I'm very impressed from an initial look over. Could you clarify how authentication happens for things like private Github repos or AWS authentication?

Thanks! Sure thing. Happy to clarify on these two topics:

- Private git repos: They work out of the box because DevPod uses regular git to clone repos and authenticate with your git hosting provider. The desktop app injects a lightweight client into the workspace and then connects from your machine to the client to inject your git credentials into the workspace. This can also be disabled for untrusted or public workspaces but it's by default on because it allows you to `git pull/push` from within the workspace without any issues.

- Credentials for providers: If you use the AWS, GCP, DO, Kubernetes or any other remote provider to provision dev workspaces with DevPod, it requires that either a) you have the credentials on your local machine (e.g. already signed-in via AWS CLI or gcloud CLI or valid kube-context/kube-config for k8s) or b) you provide the credentials directly to DevPod when adding the provider (e.g. provide k8s service account token or gcloud/aws tokens). Option a) would be my recommendation because credentials are stored safely by the respective cloud provider CLIs rather than having to trust DevPod to store them safely for you.

Re: Show HN: DevPod – Codespaces but Open Source, Client-Only, and Unopinionated

#5

Post by gkapur »

Congratulations on getting the product out! Seeing innovation in local development, which seems to satisfy a lot of use cases with MacBook compute and memory increasing all the time, with the flexibility of using the cloud will be super helpful to some companies looking to save on cost!

Re: Show HN: DevPod – Codespaces but Open Source, Client-Only, and Unopinionated

#7

Post by gentele »

brancz wrote: post #6

Neat! I enjoyed using gitpod a few times, this seems similar. How do they compare?

There are 3 main differences: 1) DevPod is based on GitHub/Microsoft's devcontainer.json standard while GitPod has their own file format 2) DevPod is client-only more like Terraform where the client creates/manages things directly using cloud credentials vs GitPod is a server-side solution to manage and provision dev workspaces 3) DevPod has a provider concept similar to Terraform that allows you to provision dev environments in ANY infra vs GitPod is mostly a hosted solution (they do have the option to host it yourself as well but it's usually you install it to one cloud and then provision in that same cloud vs DevPod is 1 client (no server, see point 2) and then you deploy the dev env in ANY cloud or even locally in Docker or local k8s)

Re: Show HN: DevPod – Codespaces but Open Source, Client-Only, and Unopinionated

#8

Post by gentele »

gkapur wrote: post #5

Congratulations on getting the product out! Seeing innovation in local development, which seems to satisfy a lot of use cases with MacBook compute and memory increasing all the time, with the flexibility of using the cloud will be super helpful to some companies looking to save on cost!

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: DevPod – Codespaces but Open Source, Client-Only, and Unopinionated

#10

Post by brancz »

gentele wrote: post #7
brancz wrote: post #6

Neat! I enjoyed using gitpod a few times, this seems similar. How do they compare?

There are 3 main differences: 1) DevPod is based on GitHub/Microsoft's devcontainer.json standard while GitPod has their own file format 2) DevPod is client-only more like Terraform where the client creates/manages things directly using cloud credentials vs GitPod is a server-side solution to manage and provision dev workspaces 3) DevPod has a provider concept similar to Terraform that allows you to provision dev env…

Interesting! Might give this a try some time. I occasionally find myself needing a Linux environment, and my primary device is an arm64 mac, I think it could be useful for that.

More generally what do you see being the prime use cases?

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