What are Codespaces?

You've chosen to set up your development environment using Codespaces! By leveraging Codespaces, you will be able to develop in the cloud in a sandboxed environment that is both persistent and is able to run in any browser. In this section, we will:

• Learn about Codespaces
• Create a Codespace and use it with your Browser
• Open the Codespace in VS Code (optional)
• Learn how to stop and resume working in a Codespace

Let's first start with learning about Codespaces.

Codespaces

GitHub Codespaces is a development environment service offered by GitHub that allows developers to write, run, test, and debug their code directly within a browser or Visual Studio Code. It provides a fully-featured cloud-hosted development environment, which can be customized to suit the requirements of a particular project, enabling developers to work from anywhere without the need to set up a local development environment.

By leveraging the power of the cloud, Codespaces eliminates inconsistencies between different local environments and streamlines collaboration among team members, all while being seamlessly integrated with the existing GitHub workflow.

Building with Codespaces in the Browser

Developing software in a browser is made possible through web-based Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), like GitHub Codespaces. These IDEs are designed to run within a web browser and provide many of the features found in traditional desktop IDEs.

Pros

• Access: Users can access the browser-based IDE from any device with internet connectivity and a modern web browser.
• No Installation: Users do not have to install additional software

Cons

• Performance: Browser-based IDEs might not be as responsive or fast as native desktop IDEs, especially for large projects or computationally intensive tasks.
• Functionality: Some advanced features found in desktop IDEs might be absent or limited in a browser environment (keyboard shortcuts, port-forwarding).

Building with Codespaces through VS Code

GitHub Codespaces can be used with Visual Studio Code (VS Code), enabling developers to connect to a Codespace directly from their local VS Code installation. This brings the convenience of cloud-hosted environments to the familiarity of VS Code.

You can find detailed instruction on how to open a codespace from your local VS Code later in this course.