So containers revolutionized the industry and made running applications using their exact depenencies simple.

Over time the setup often became brittle and somehow the approach never felt like a perfect match for the problem.īut wait! Why don’t we use the benefits of containers to solve the issue? Didn’t they make pretty much every dependency our software needed to run finally describable in code, simply by using a Dockerfile? Treat dev environments like any other infrastructure But most of the time we ended up with putting lots of effort into the automation – never really solving the issue completely. Some of them even involved using infrastructure automation tools like Ansible, which could easily configure our shiny MacOS or Linux machines. We tried to solve it using several tools and approaches. Focussing on CI/CD and DevOps topics I was thrown into the situation to automate the setup of developer environments many times.

My professional career somehow always focussed on finding the best ways to develop software. Aren’t GitHub Codespaces based on VS Code Dev Containers? So I thought it might be the right time to dig into the topic … How to get developer environment setups right?īut it wasn’t only the post and my colleague that made me look into Dev Containers. Now my head started to put the pieces together. I also remember my great colleague Thomas Darimont mentioning Visual Studio Code Dev Containers at a codecentric internal Dev Friday. One of the tools he wrote about was GitHub Codespaces, which GitHub itself started to use as their default IDE setup for a while now – leaving their MacOS based one behind. The topic had been there for a while, but I didn’t really dig into it until Rainer wrote his post. And among many others participating this spring our very own CEO Rainer Vehns finally wrote a blog post about cloud based IDEs.

local IDE battle?!Ĭurrently, we’re running the so called Focus Months at codecentric. But what if we could use remote development techniques like Development Containers or GitHub Codespaces to finally overcome the “works on my machine” problem? And also end the cloud vs. We love them, and hate them at the same time: local development environments.

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