The Wonder of Gitpod
This week I had an introduction to using Gitpod and I have to say I was pretty impressed with it. Whilst working on a project in my day job (with a London local authority), I encountered an issue that was stopping me from running one of the repos in a Docker container. Rather than be blocked on this, whilst having a look at things on Gitlab, I noticed that you can add a Gitpod integration that lets you launch a development environment from a GitLab browser tab once the integration is enabled.
Once enabled I was able to have a browser based VSCode environment with the ability to checkout the repository, run Docker containers, commit and push work as normal. The VSCode environment can be set up just like your desktop app, so I added my preferred extensions. If your repo has a VSCode workspace in it, the browser version of VSCode will be able to open the workspace also.
I found the experience to be pretty slick and since I'm going to be travelling a bit over the Christmas holidays, it'll be a pretty neat way to get some work done on the go. I think I will also start to use it for reviewing other dev's Merge Requests also or quickly fixing any issues on my own that have been flagged. It's definitely going to be something I will be using more in the future.
The Wonder of Gitpod was originally published on Medium.com by Niall McKenna