The prebuilt development environment provider Gitpod has announced it is now open source, enabling teams to automatically spin up ready-to-code environments for GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket projects. Gitpod is a browser-based, VS Code-powered Kubernetes application.
With Gitpod, developers can maintain their environments as code and turn manual tasks into machine-executable code.
“These days, developers are dealing with complex polyglot projects composed of many microservices. With such cloud-native architectures, setting up and managing dev environments becomes extremely challenging,” said Sven Efftinge, co-founder and CEO of Gitpod. “Gitpod allows developers to start coding instantly with a single click from any branch, issue, and from any merge and pull request respectively. Think CI/CD applied to dev environments.”
According to the company, the open-source solution is very similar to CI systems. It watches changes happening in the repository and prepares the dev environment based on those changes. For instance, it sets up tools, checks out the right git branch, compiles code, downloads dependencies and provides a ready-to-code dev environment. Key features include integrated Docker build, integrated code reviews, snapshots, and a free self-hosted version.
Other benefits include shorter lead times, no configuration “drift,” and remote collaboration, according to the company.
“In line with the pets vs. cattle analogy of the cloud-native world, we treat dev environments as automated (yet customizable) resources you can spin up when you need them and close down (and forget about) when you are done with your task. Once you experience the peace of mind of automated, ephemeral dev environments you never want to go back,” Efftinge, and Johannes Landgraf, chief commercial officer at Gitpod, wrote in a post.
