Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

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From Coder.com

  Code on your Chromebook, tablet, and laptop with a consistent dev environment.

  If you have a Windows or Mac workstation, more easily develop for Linux.

  Take advantage of large cloud servers to speed up tests, compilations, downloads, and more.

  Preserve battery life when you're on the go.

  All intensive computation runs on your server.

  You're no longer running excess instances of Chrome.

I imagine not everybody is going to want to run this on some Kubernetes cluster. The ability to do this locally seems that it could be really productive, actually. And having it in Docker can provide snapshotting via `docker commit` as well as the ability to cap its cpu/ram resources.

I might actually try this and a Docker registry to get some semblance of an editor per project. In some contexts I want to run many, many extensions,but for other work I'd rather not have that bloat to contend with. Also I've been really feeling the pain of navigating a PC running Unraid (lots of bare metal VMs) and a Mac laptop, trying to do development on each. My desktop is beefy, but I need to work on the go sometimes, and at times I need to use a Windows box. Right now they all have different VSCode setups. I've been meaning to get around to setting up some scheme of making my config portable, but with different paths across Ubuntu, MacOS, and Windows that seems a bit daunting to get all of my dep paths straight, like eslint and phpcs.

Okay, enough comment writing, I'm giving this a go.

Some updates for those who are interested:

1. I first tried to install this on my Win10 VM, which needed to have Docker installed. That was a terrible idea. I completely broke my VM as Docker tried to enable Hyper-V. Friends don't let friends attempt nested virtualization. I should have just run the container on the host instead, which it supports quite well.

2. The repo worked as the blog post described on my mac. Its quick and has been able to run some tricky extensions. I need to experiment with running some external dependancies still.

3. Docker commit worked nicely, making a layer for the changes I made. Still playing with this, but wow that could be very productive if it enabled me to roll back to a tested base environment, or share a full IDE image with somebody on my team.

Glad it worked for you! Hadn't even thought about Docker commit, but the latter was one of the ideas I had in mind for this (not just share code with teammates, but also a fully working environment, IDE included, that they can jump right into).

> I completely broke my VM as Docker tried to enable Hyper-V. Friends don't let friends attempt nested virtualization.

Is that not supported by hyper-v? It's not common, but as long as your hardware and kernel support it, Linux/KVM work with nested virtualisation out of the box.

Docker for windows uses hyper-v for it's virtualization. It works.

But if you're running win10 virtually then it's not going to be able to run hyper-v, that's a limitation of window and hyper-v and not docker.

But if you're running win10 via a vm why don't you just already have the host start a linux docker vm instead of hyper-v in hyper-v?

So it's basically installing an IDE on a server and remoting into it? Are docker and VSCode bringing anything to the table?

Yes and there are a few self-hosted web based IDE options out there. I just happen to like VSCode, mostly for its flexibility and extensions.

Docker just makes it convenient to deploy with a run command vs making a local server on multiple machines. I haven’t tried it yet, but being able to snapshot a running machine also seems incredibly useful.

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