We’re excited to announce our cloud development environment implementation, based on GitHub Codespaces. This new type of development environment allows our customers to move faster and integrate their work directly with their code repositories.
This implementation will empower you to start developing immediately, without having to install and configure any software on your computer. Code from any device, you don’t even have to have a computer to develop.
GitHub Codespaces is a powerful feature that allows users to spin up development environments in the cloud in mere minutes.
Codespaces unlocks exciting possibilities like quickly sharing the results of your work with other members of the team or stakeholders and even pair programming (utilizing LiveShare). It’s much easier to share a link to your codespace than recording a demo or having a call to run a live demonstration.
Codespaces can be run in-browser or within select IDEs like Visual Studio Code and Jetbrains IDEs.
What’s included?
WordPress VIP implementation with GitHub Codespaces is packed with all the features you can find in the VIP Local Development Environment including XDebug, Mailpit, Photon, phpMyAdmin, Elasticsearch, and Cron. We provided conservative default values, many of these optional services are disabled by default, the configuration can be tweaked in features key of ‘devcontainer.json’.
Tooling like WP-CLI, latest LTS version of Node.js, and latest VIP-CLI is preinstalled for your convenience.
We’ve designed it in a way to be extensible so you can add your own features (including privately published ones), further tailoring your cloud development workflow to your needs.
Who’s it for?
We don’t intend this tool to be a replacement for VIP Local Development Environments, both products will receive the same level of support. Each has their own primary use-cases.
Using the VIP Local Development Environment would be preferred in the following scenarios:
- The lack of a steady internet connection.
- Running an Elasticsearch instance. It’s very resource intensive and requires at least 4 cores in Codespaces.
- Have company policies preventing you from having the data on third-party services (in this case, GitHub.)
Using codespaces will help with the following cases:
- Inability to install or run Docker and Node.js. For example, for compliance and security reasons some companies disallow installing Docker. This is not an issue when using Codespaces since you’re not installing anything at all.
- Quick access to work-in-progress features. All it takes is setting the visibility of the codespace to `public` and sharing a public link.
- LiveShare makes it extremely easy to participate in pair programming sessions.
Find out more about our support on GitHub Codespaces in the documentation.
Use of Codespaces within the ‘wpcomvip’ GitHub organization is available as a part of our Enhanced and Premier packages. Please open a support ticket and our team will get you set up.
To work with Codespaces outside of the wpcomvip organization, customers can copy the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file to their own GitHub repository. Each user gets up to 180 hours of compute free. Please refer to the Codespaces billing page for more details.
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