Running your code in a cloud-based environment in your browser only. No need to deploy somewhere to test it.
Over recent years, desktop software is beaten by the online or browsers software: music moves from Itunes to Spotify, videos move from CD or DVD to Netflix, word processing moved to online google docs.
Whereas web development or online software numbers keep on increasing. Like we leave all the powerful things to browsers or online component to handle. The programming editors or code editors still use the local system to edit the code and host online parties like GitHub.
But also there are some online tools like Glitch and codePen which give benefit to developers to work on the web.
Now the popular software development hosting platform GitHub may be about to change the status quo. The Microsoft owned company unveiled a new code editor called Codespace. It works entirely on the browser, regardless of the device you are using. Based on the same code base as Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor - which runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Codespaces creates a button on the GitHub website that is a one-click route to your entire development environment online. Since GitHub is where many developers are already accessing and storing their code regardless of which coding environment they use, it’s a convenient place to launch a code editor. And there’s no need to install anything on your device.
To be clear, Codespaces isn’t just a code editor—it’s also an entire “containerized” version of your servers, meaning it allows you to preconfigure whatever resources you need, like a PHP server and a Redis cache, to work on a project.
Made popular by a company called Docker, containers allow server functionality to be packaged into tiny, lightweight slices, which can be mix-and-matched together to build a development environment. If you’re working on a PHP-based Laravel project, for example, you’ll need a PHP server, MySQL, and a Redis cache. With containerization, you specify that you need each of these technologies, and they’re set up every time you open your codebase, making it easier to move between machines and reproduce your development environment without reconfiguring it on each device.
Each Codespaces environment contains a Dockerfile, which specifies the containers and configuration of your environment, as well as a file that tells Codespaces how you want your development environment set up.
Now let me tell you how it works, there are two types in which you can use it.
By using Microsoft Azure or by enabling it on your GitHub account. The beta version on GitHub is free to use.
On the browser Itself it opens a UI that is almost similar to Microsoft Visual Code editor. you write your code there and that code is stored, compiled, run on the docker system of Microsoft azure.
An Instant continuous deployment system. No need to wait to push all your code into the GitHub and then deploy it.
But what if your code is on Github and you want to debug it from there then choose rather than sign in with azure sign in with the GitHub account then a button on the top right corner appears to debug it.
The Mazor part of Codespaces, however, is a “remote” feature that allows developers to use their existing desktop installs of Microsoft Visual Studio Code whenever they want to, even if they don’t have a powerful computer capable of running their actual codebase with them. When they’re on the go, they can connect to their Visual Studio Code environment using the feature and use the web editor in the cloud, with all the same setup, extensions, and even color schemes, as if they were working on their local machine.
While cloud-based products similar to Codespaces, like Coder and Amazon’s Cloud9, have existed for three years, Codespaces’ advantage is that it’s directly integrated into GitHub.
It’s worth acknowledging that getting Codespaces set up just right takes an investment the first time around: You need to figure out which technologies your project needs and ensure that it all comes together just right. But with little effort upfront, when you click “code” on GitHub in the future, it’s all set up in the cloud a matter of seconds, ready to go.
Thank You !! Be sure to drop a comment for any query.
You can go and check the codespaces here - https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/visual-studio-codespaces/