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Comment by gentele | Hacker News Reader

Port-forwarding and using your local IDE is already working in DevPod today. We also added auto-port-forward where it watches what happens inside the container and then starts port-forwarding automagically.

File sync: That is a great idea. We got that in DevSpace already as you mentioned and we definitely think this could be super valuable in DevPod as well. Right now, a git push and then pull is required to get things from inside DevPod updated on local but with sync this would be even easier and faster.

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We have a designer on the team that uses a Windows box. This could be a great way to get him spun up without having to build him a local setup and manage two sets of local dependencies for him on Windows and us on macOS.

How well does it work for web dev - Django specifically? Is it as simple as running the dev server and accessing the locally-forwarded port through a local browser? Are there any gotchas to be aware of? Thanks!

Exactly. add a devcontainer similar to the example repo in [1], install the devpod app and point it to the repository and your designer is good to go, including port forwarding to their localhost

[1] https://github.com/backendclub/example-django-devcontainers

Thanks! Is it trivial to “copy” container connection information between machines? For example, can I write a devcontainer.json, spin up a back-end on Digital Ocean, make sure it has all the necessary envs and system dependencies and is working correctly, then just copy-paste connection information to that pod and send it to my designer, where he just pastes it into his DevPod desktop app and is off to the races?

Once you set up the provider on the designers machine, you can embed a deep link to the desktop app in your repo, similar to the „open in devpod“ button in our repo [1]. [1] https://github.com/loft-sh/devpod/blob/main/README.md (See line 11). This makes sure they open the correct repo with the provider you configured and are ready to go

For your use case it’d be cool to share provider information between parties. We‘ll think about it, although that might also be a potential selling point for teams and a commercial product…

Perfect, thanks for your time. Provider setup + deep link will work fine for us.

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