Developer enviornment

Table of Contents

Intro

In the world of development, Docker often comes up, and the classic “It worked for me” discussions follow. We all know the power of Docker containers in testing, deploying code, and packaging applications.

What are DevPods?

DevPods allow each developer environment to run in a separate container, specified through the devcontainer.json file. The containers are created locally using Docker.

One of the best features? DevPods come with a beautiful GUI that simplifies the process, and there’s even a solid VS Code extension to manage them. But, as DevOps professionals, we tend to lean on the CLI for automation. Here’s why:

  • Automating DevPod creation becomes much easier.

  • We can quickly copy, delete, or change configurations (like swapping IDEs).

  • GUI is for the weak – we thrive on efficiency with the CLI.

DevPods: getting-started

Install

curl -L -o devpod "https://github.com/loft-sh/devpod/releases/latest/download/devpod-linux-amd64" && sudo install -c -m 0755 devpod /usr/local/bin && rm -f devpod

If you use Arch (BTW), there is a simpler option:

yay -S devpod-bin

let’s verify the install with:

devpod-cli --version

Also, I will make an alias for devpod-cli in my ~/.bashrc:

alias devpod-cli='devpod'

Another great thing with DevPod, that you can get you environment into GitOps apps so you can work on it on every machine when you clone it.

First use configurations

We got the list of providers for DePod:

devpod provider list-available

We will get this output:

List of available providers from loft:
	aws
	azure
	civo
	digitalocean

There is no Docker? no problem, let’s add it as a provider:

devpod provider add docker

then we can see it in the providers list:

     NAME  | VERSION | DEFAULT | INITIALIZED |   DESCRIPTION     
  ---------+---------+---------+-------------+-------------------
    docker | v0.0.1  | true    | true        | DevPod on Docker

Let’s see the IDEs we can pick with:

devpod ide list

The output:

         NAME       | DEFAULT  
  ------------------+----------
    clion           | false    
    codium          | false    
    cursor          | false    
    dataspell       | false    
    fleet           | false    
    goland          | false    
    intellij        | false    
    jupyternotebook | false    
    none            | false    
    openvscode      | false    
    phpstorm        | false    
    positron        | false    
    pycharm         | false    
    rider           | false    
    rstudio         | false    
    rubymine        | false    
    rustrover       | false    
    vscode          | false    
    vscode-insiders | false    
    webstorm        | false    
    zed             | false

To pick a provider we going to use:

devpod ise use <ide-name>

After picking an ide, the false going to change to true next to it.

.devcontainer.json

We going to configure the Dev container with devcontainer.json file:

Image lists: https://github.com/devcontainers/images/tree/main/src

{
  "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:ubuntu",
}

After setting the image, we can also add features and there is no limits.

Features docs

Can look like this:

{
  "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:ubuntu",
  "features": {
    "ghcr.io/devcontainers-extra/features/neovim-homebrew:1": {},
    "ghcr.io/rio/features/chezmoi": {}
  }
}

Starting the devcontainer

To create the DevPod we run: (in the devcontainer directory)

devpod up .

Useful flags

If wanted there are a lot of flags you can use as well:

--dotfiles https://github.com/MorielMauni/dotfiles.git
--ide none/vscode/openvscode/jupyternotebook
--recreate 
--debug

Connect

When it’s successfully done, run and connect to the pod:

devpod ssh

Pick the devpod you created (same name as the directory you worked on). The ide of pick will be open, if you picked none just the terminal going to be connected to the devpod like a ssh connection.