Daytona is an open source tool for setting up development environments in one command.  

“Setting up a dev environment can feel like starting a car in the 1900s—engaging the handbrake, adjusting the fuel valve, mixture control, spark advance, choke, and throttle, turning the ignition, and often running into issues. With Daytona, it’s like starting a car in 2024: any driver can just push a button and go. Enabling developers to focus on what truly matters—writing code and building innovative solutions,” Ivan Burazin, CEO and co-founder of Daytona, wrote in a blog post. 

Development environments in Daytona are called Workspaces and they are reproducible, meaning that configurations and settings can be done once and then carried over. Currently, Workspaces are based on the Dev Container standard, but the project’s documentation claims that there is the potential to base it on other standards down the line, like Dockerfiles, Docker Compose, Nix, and Devfile. 

Daytona can run on any type of machine, including local, remote, cloud-based, physical service, VM, or any x86 or ARM architecture. 

It supports VS Code and JetBrains locally, and also has a built-in Web IDE. It also offers integrations with several Git providers, including GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Bitbucket Server, Gitea, Fitness, Azure DevOps, and AWS CodeCommit.

Multiple project repositories can exist under one Workspace, so that developers using a microservices architecture can easily use Daytona for their development needs.

It also offers reverse proxy capabilities to enable collaboration among developers and streamline feedback loops.

For security purposes, during setup, it automatically creates a VPN connection from the client machine to the development environment. This connection also provides access to all ports in the development environment, which eliminates the need for setting up port forwarding.

According to a blog post written by Burazin, the project reached 4,000 stars on GitHub within the first week of the project being open sourced. Now it is at nearly 8,000 stars and has 39 developers contributing to it. 

The open-source project is built and maintained by a company of the same name, which in June received $5 million in seed funding to grow the project.

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