github codespaces ✨
While playing around with Ruby on Rails (I’m looking at converting this site to run on Rails because reasons) I noticed that GitHub Codespaces is now out of Early Access/beta.
The offer is fairly simple, and super robust. Add a branch of your repository to Codespaces and it launches a cloud instance of your repo in VS Code with a console. In the background is a compute engine/cloud instance/VM running a bunch of popular systems out of the box, and it’s super easy to add more.
To add Ruby on Rails and run my instance, for instance, all I had to do was:
$ rvm install ruby-2.7.4
$ rvm use 2.7.4
$ gem install rails
$ rails server
You get a considerable amount of free-use for running your dev environment, and the enterprise options don’t seem ridiculous, either.
Controversial thought: GitHub has gone from strength to strength since the Microsoft acquisition–with the exception of sunsetting Atom. Rip Atom.
Complete aside: https://github.com/github/renaming