For a number of years DDEV focused on Gitpod as its in-the-cloud development environment, but Gitpod is discontinuing the service that made that all possible (”Gitpod Classic”). We have also supported GitHub Codespaces for a few years, but the level of support hasn’t been the same as with Gitpod.
With a high-quality, well-supported cloud DDEV setup, developers get
- An easy independent test environment for their TYPO3 or other DDEV projects
- An easy way to test DDEV PRs or HEAD builds
- A disposable (or not) project-specific “local” development environment
- A number of developers do all their client work in a cloud IDE
- Onboarding and training opportunities for new TYPO3 users or contributors, who don’t even have to have a local development environment.
What will be done
- Update and streamline DDEV’s Codespaces install guide and technique
- Specific instructions for TYPO3 and other CMS/Framework users.
- Attempt to use newer docker daemon in the Codespaces docker-in-docker setup.
- Solve open Codespaces issues in the DDEV queue
- Update the default extra project to be configurable and maintainable
- Experiment with a way to do automated testing that will exercise codespaces usage
- Update devcontainer package for alternate use.
- Experiment with enabling the ddev-router (Traefik router) on Codespaces to make it more of a natural DDEV environment
Questions:
How much does GitHub Codespaces cost? GitHub currently gives generous free usage. A free GitHub account currently gets 120 core hours/month which means 60 hours of usage on an ordinary (useful) DDEV VM. (Additional hours of usage are also available at what seems to be a fair price.)
What can TYPO3 users do with this initiative?
- Load a one-off project change in a cloud environment without affecting their local environment
- Do client work the same as with any other “local” development environment
- Collaborate on code (pair programming) with other devs, and see the results right away
- Test DDEV PRs or HEAD versions without installing locally
How does this relate to the TYPO3 Q1 one-click TYPO3 playground? The excellent one-click TYPO3 playground is aimed at quickly trying out TYPO3 and operates in the browser as a way to experiment with TYPO3 as a CMS. The Codespaces support here is a full professional VS Code-based development environment in the cloud, which works for both experienced and new developers in many contexts.
The related DDEV issue is TYPO3 Q3 Community Idea Budget Proposal: Improved GitHub Codespaces support · Issue #7294 · ddev/ddev · GitHub