devpod VS devbox

We recommend using the Dev Container configuration with Visual Studio Code (VS Code) or DevPod to ensure a consistent development experience across different computers and environments. It may sound complicated, but it is as easy as a breeze!

When you push your code to Github, you can develop the app using codespace and it will automatically set up an online development environment for you. Other tools will make your life easier when developing using a dev container e.g. DevPod.

DevPod is that new kid in town that works on the same standard of devcontainers.json that Codespaces uses but is on the infrastructure of your choice and is open source. The project was just launched this May and has gathered more than 5.3K stars in this period. The advantage is the lower costs (around 5-10 times cheaper than cloud VMs) with auto-shutdown.

For students, unless there are allocated server resources with network access, it SHOULD/MUST scale down to one local offline ARM64 node (because school districts haven't afforded containers on a managed k8s cloud for students at scale fwiu, though universities do with e.g. JupyterHub and BinderHub [4] and Colab).

For Chromebook sysadmins, Instructors, and Students learning about how {Linux*, ChromiumOS, Android, Git, Bash, ZSH, Python, and e.g. PyData Tools supported by NumFOCUS} are developed, for example;

When you git commit to a git branch, and then `git push` that branch to GitHub, and create a Pull Request, GitHub Actions runs the (container,command) tasks defined in the YAML files in the .github/workflows/ directory of the repo; so `git push` to a PR branch runs the CI job and the results are written back as cards in the Pull Request thread on the GitHub Project; saving to the server runs the (container,command) Actions with that revision of the git repo.

Somewhat-equivalent GitOps CI Continuous Integration workflows (without Bazel or Blaze or gtest or gn, or GitHub Enterprise or GitHub Free due to the kids' intererests) that might be supported at least in analogue by Education and Chromebooks: k8s with podman-desktop in a VM, Gitea Actions (nektos/act; like Github Actions), devpod

devpod: https://github.com/loft-sh/devpod :

> Codespaces but open-source, client-only and unopinionated: Works with any IDE and lets you use any cloud, kubernetes or just localhost docker. (with devcontainer.json, like Github Codespaces)

devcontainer.json is supported by a number of tools; e.g. VScode, IntelliJ,: https://containers.dev/supporting

repo2docker has buildpacks (like Heroku and Google AppEngine).

repo2docker buildpacks should probably work with devcontainer.json too?

repo2docker docs > Usage > "REES: Reproducible Execution Environment" describes what all repo2docker will build a container from: https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html

jupyterhub/repo2docker builds a Dockerfile (Containerfile) from git repo (or a Figshare/Zenodo DOI) that minimally has at least an /environment.yml and /example.py (and probably also at least a /README.md to start with), and installs a current, updated version of jupyter notebook along with whatever's in e.g. /environment.yml per the REES spec. [1][2][3]

[1] repo2docker/buildpacks/base.py: https://github.com/jupyterhub/repo2docker/blob/main/repo2doc...

[2] "Make base_image configurable" https://github.com/jupyterhub/repo2docker/commit/20b08152578...

[3] repo2docker/buildpacks/conda/environment.py-3.11.yml:

Also see https://devpod.sh/ which has had quite a lot of exposure on HN recently.

For these reasons, I believe most developer environments should prioritize developer experience over fidelity. Tools like Containerized development environments and cloud emulators can strike the right balance and there’s no surprise that we see increased activity around devcontainers, and similar solutions.

Have you considered devcontainers?

Its use results in carrying entire development environments with you, while not cluttering your host OS.

Using DevPod (https://devpod.sh/) ypu are not locked into Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code, but you can use whatever tool you want.

IMO this kind of setup will provide a much better DX than running a bunch of VMs eating away the resources of your laptop.

Before I went on my Christmas vacation last year I wrote an article on how I use Nix in my Elm projects. At the time, I was pleased with my set up. However, not even a month would go by before my satisfaction was questioned. In early January, Carlo Ascani asked a question, on the Elm Discourse, about his Umbra project. I decided to explore his project and I soon discovered two files, devbox.json and devbox.lock, I had never seen before. This piqued my curiosity and I had to learn more. I followed the link to the Devbox website and feverishly read the docs. I... was... hooked. I was pleasantly surprised by its simplicity and it seemed to fit my use cases really well.

How does Flox compare to Devbox? https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

I've spent the last year managing all my packages with Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox).

Local dev, cloud dev, CI, production – all with the same config file. Fingers crossed my talk submission for PackagingCon gets accepted. It'd be awesome to share this new way of working with a wider audience.

> Now to figure out what a "flake" is…

Flake is a worthwhile addition to Nix that is worth learning. But like anything Nixian, it's not straightforward.

Have you checked out any of the tools that aim to simplify Nix experience? We built Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox) with this in mind.

Also devbox ( https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox ) which is what this is for does not work on windows because of its Nix dependency.

For these reasons, I believe most developer environments should prioritize developer experience over fidelity. Tools like Containerized development environments and cloud emulators can strike the right balance and there’s no surprise that we see increased activity around devcontainers, and similar solutions.

Local first, cloud optional is the only way (IMHO) we're going to get people off their local laptop development setups.

We need to support local dev environments first, with the exact same config a developer can then move to the cloud.

See https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox for how this can be achieved and https://www.mikenikles.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-clou... for my thoughts after 3 years of working in this space.

If you like the properties of Nix, but find it confusing, you should check out Devbox! It simplifies the process of creating Nix-powered dev environments:

https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

As part of the work we've been doing with [devbox](https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox), we needed a unit testing framework to test some of our nix code. Unfortunately we had some use cases where we did *not* want to introduce a dependency on `nixpkgs` (and therefore we couldn't use `runTests`).