GitHub Codespaces is a cloud-based development environment that allows developers to create a development environment that is hosted in the cloud. It provides a container that offers common languages, tools, and utilities for development. Developers can customize their project for GitHub Codespaces by committing configuration files to their repository, which creates a repeatable codespace configuration for all users of the project.
Some key features of GitHub Codespaces include:
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Container-based development environment: GitHub Codespaces uses a container as the development environment, which is created based on configurations that can be defined in a devcontainer.json file and, optionally, a Dockerfile.
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Customization: Developers can customize their GitHub Codespaces by configuring dev container files to their repository, which creates a repeatable codespace configuration for all users of the project.
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Ephemeral: GitHub Codespaces is designed to be ephemeral, meaning that it can be used as an isolated environment to experiment, check a teammates pull request, or fix a bug.
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Accessibility: GitHub Codespaces allows developers to code from any device and get a standardized environment as long as they have internet access.
Developers can create a codespace from a template, from their repository for new feature work, or from an open pull request to explore work-in-progress. GitHub Codespaces run on a variety of VM-based compute options hosted by GitHub.com, which can be configured from 2 core machines up to 32 core machines. Developers can connect to their codespaces from the browser or locally using an IDE like Visual Studio Code or IntelliJ.
