Portable Coding Magic
Harness the true power of portable coding environments- stow, dotfiles, and coder, oh my!
I recently found Coder through a video made by DevOps Toolbox which made me rethink my entire approach to portable environments. A big thank you to Omer Hamerman for introducing me to Coder.
I’ve used stow to track my dotfiles for a while but after discovering coder an entirely new universe opened up to me.
Coder, at it’s core, is an open source remote development environment. It’s goal is to make development environments easily reproducable and machine, OS, and cloud agnostic. You create a template from which you can build a workspace. A workspace represents a desktop development environment with all the tooling needed for a given project. Instead of setting my laptop up to be able to develop in theRust, Python, Java, and Node ecosystems, I can create a desktop template dedicated to each of them and use the one I need. And any developer with access to the template can create an identically tooled desktop.
This sounded too good to be true so I had to give it a test spin. There are instructions for installing on a Mac, Linux, or “Other”. The “other” environment is big catchall. It can be installed on Docker, K8s, OpenShift, a number of cloud platforms, and offline for air-gapped needs.
