Gitpod, my new on-demand 🛎 dev environment 👨‍💻

I am writing this post from a Gitpod environment, launched directly from my blog’s repository URL.

You can try this just now: https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/doppelganger9/blog

Did you see how easy and smart it is to just add https://gitpod.io/# in front of your GitHub repo to launch the environment ?

Ok, time to make it trippy:

via GIPHY

What is this?

As you see, the idea is to have a VisualStudio Code in the browser development environment bootstrapped from your repository.

To be more precise, it is based on Theia IDE

extensions

It does not come with your collection of VSCode Extensions, but it is enough useful for 95% of the time.

network stability

It has a few disconnecting moments.

exposing a local web server

It can expose ports like when you need to run your dev web server, it is possible and really frictionless.

closing files

Whoops, If like me you are used to hitting CMD + W on VSCode to close files, this will not work here, because it will close the browser tab! Hopefully, opening back https://gitpod.io shows my workspaces and the one I accidentally closed is still running and I can reopen it in the state it was (process running, etc.) which is well thought!

free plan

Don’t forget to stop your workspaces, the free tier gives you 100 Hours which is really sufficient for my kind of usage: working on Github Repositories outside of working hours.

This integration test is failing

After I finished writing the first draft of this post, I tried to git push, but I encountered this error:

 ! [remote rejected]  ... (refusing to allow an integration to create .github/main.workflow)

GitHub rejects my push because it seems that when you enable Github Actions it blocks all other GitHub Integrations from working. And Gitpod is one such Integration.

Well… again not everything is and .

Damn, after a little search, it seems there really is an issue about this.

Oh once you enable @GitHub Actions on a repo no other integration will work. For example trying to push a git tag using a deploy key will error out with: "refusing to allow an integration to create .github/main.workflow"

— Stefan Prodan (@stefanprodan) January 28, 2019

Yes, it's a bug, and we're working on a fix. There are security reasons not to let integrations write to main.workflow, but our current version of this check may be too restrictive. Thanks for the report.

— Patrick Reynolds (@p_reynolds) January 28, 2019

Partial fix and git-fu

I could not resolve myself to neither remove Github Actions nor drop using Gitpod!

So I…

• git stash-ed my uncommitted changes,
• git checkout - to leave the git branch I had dedicated for this post and come back to the previous one (git checkout master also works, but 5 more characters to type? Meh.)
• git cherry-pick-ed the commits I did, not knowing the push rejection issue,
• git push worked from master, so I knew I would not have to copy all my changes out of Gitpod to my local computer,
• git stash pop-ped and proceeded from here to continue writing this paragraph and push it live!

Conclusion

So, as I’ve experienced sort of an emotional rollercoaster, at a moment I thought that even though I really liked the idea of having a “remote VS Code in the browser” and in the past had found it very useful, combining this with Github Actions had ruined it. But pushing from master did the trick!

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I hope you learned a few things or at least witnessed how I bump against issues and go on .

Thanks for reading this blog, If you have any questions, please use the Github Repository’s Issues to start a conversation.