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Codespaces but open-source, client-only, and unopinionated

devpod.sh

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Re: Codespaces but open-source, client-only, and unopinionated

#31

Post by gentele »

earthling8118 wrote: post #27
Smaug123 wrote: post #15

> DevPod is the first and only tool for creating and managing dev environments that does not require a heavyweight server-side setup. I guess either "dev environment" means something different to what I understand by the term, or Nixpkgs is considered a "heavyweight server-side setup"?

Well you see if they acknowledged nix then they wouldn't be able to claim to be the first.

Haha, spicy. We definitely don't want to overlook nix. It's a great tool. We do mean something different with "developer environment" in that context of this quoted sentence. I'm not sure if nix will help you much if you want to connect your VS Code to a remote VM or container to work inside of that environment. We'll work on rewording this though to make things clearer :)

Re: Codespaces but open-source, client-only, and unopinionated

#32

Post by Smaug123 »

gentele wrote: post #31
earthling8118 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you see if they acknowledged nix then they wouldn't be able to claim to be the first.

Haha, spicy. We definitely don't want to overlook nix. It's a great tool. We do mean something different with "developer environment" in that context of this quoted sentence. I'm not sure if nix will help you much if you want to connect your VS Code to a remote VM or container to work inside of that environment. We'll work on rewording this though to make things clearer :)

"Containerised" would be less ambiguous, I think.

Re: Codespaces but open-source, client-only, and unopinionated

#33

Post by karl_gluck »

gigel82 wrote: post #6

I really envy folks working on backend / web stuff when I see these kind of things. Stuck building client apps on desktop and mobile, the options are slim (full VMs, slowness, etc.)

Same. I started building an automated solution for building gamedev environments in VM’s[1] but I can’t help but think there should be a better way.

[1] https://github.com/karlgluck/swiss-chocolatey-lab

Re: Codespaces but open-source, client-only, and unopinionated

#34

Post by brazzledazzle »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #9

What are some of the competitors in this space? - Gitpod, a SaaS competitor to Codespaces. http://gitpod.io - Coder, which I guess is the more enterprisey self-hosted Codespaces alternative? https://coder.com - This project, Devpod, seems to be a polished experience but not centralized like Coder. - I recently stumbled upon Recode, which looks like a more indie take on the problem. https://github.com/recode-sh/cli

AWS has Cloud9[1] though it's worth pointing out that it's not an exact a 1:1 and may require some elbow grease to use in the same manner[2].

1. https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/

2. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/field-notes-use-aw... (2021)

Re: Codespaces but open-source, client-only, and unopinionated

#36

Post by sandGorgon »

andrewmunsell wrote: post #7

I'm likely not the target audience, but I personally see "client-only" as a disadvantage. Ultimately I use VS Code to stand up devcontainers on my laptop, but I sometimes need to do dev work on my iPad and don't want to pay for Github Codespaces. Gitpod has worked for me in the past and I've gotten Coder setup. Maybe this will be nice to get Jetbrains IDEs working with the devcontainer standard, since IIRC they don't…

+1 on this. something like openvscode integrated would be awesome

Re: Codespaces but open-source, client-only, and unopinionated

#38

Post by gentele »

Smaug123 wrote: post #32
gentele wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, spicy. We definitely don't want to overlook nix. It's a great tool. We do mean something different with "developer environment" in that context of this quoted sentence. I'm not sure if nix will help you much if you want to connect your VS Code to a remote VM or container to work inside of that environment. We'll work on rewording this though to make things clearer :)

"Containerised" would be less ambiguous, I think.

Oh yeah, that would make it clearer! Thanks

Re: Codespaces but open-source, client-only, and unopinionated

#40

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

I'm glad this space is expanding. This is created by the authors of Loft.sh and Devspaces, both really great solutions to the most common problems of developing natively in a K8s cluster.

DevPod is basically Vagrant but with containers, which brings a ton of benefits over the former VM-centric design. You can maintain an entire team (or organization) with one immutable development environment, to get away from the constant toil of fixing random problems on random people's dev environments that happened because they changed something locally and don't have an immutable environment to restore.

The fact that it's self-hosted means you can take it anywhere (your laptop, GCloud, AWS, Azure, etc). Containers means you can save resources or scale it, reuse public containers and container ecosystem tools. Unopinionated means you aren't forced to use one IDE or platform. Open Source means you can read the source to figure out what's going on and hack in a solution if needed.

This one is still early days it seems, as it doesn't run on my Mac (I opened an issue). But the benefits once it works will be incredible. I've been trying to onboard our teams to Devspace, which has its warts [and lack of docs], but is still lightyears better than most other solutions. Once DevPod is stable I'll be looking into moving to it.

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