GitHub Codespaces

© GitHub.

At its virtual Satellite event, GitHub announced the launch of the beta version of Codespaces, providing developers with a complete, cloud-based development environment, based on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code Online editor (in case you missed it, Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018). “Contributing code to a community can be hard. Every repository has its own way of configuring a dev environment, which often requires dozens of steps before you can write any code,” wrote Shanku Niyogi, GitHub’s Product VP, in the press release on GitHub news. “Even worse, sometimes the environment of two projects you are working on conflict with one another. GitHub Codespaces gives you a fully-featured cloud-hosted dev environment that spins up in seconds, directly within GitHub, so you can start contributing to a project right away.” GitHub says that it hasn’t yet finalized the pricing of Codespaces, but that it’ll probably be pay-as-you-go.

⇨ The Register, Tim Anderson, “GitHub Codespaces: VS Code was ‘designed from the get-go’ for this, says Microsoft architect.”

⇨ The GitHub Blog, Shanku Niyogi, “New from Satellite 2020: GitHub Discussions, Codespaces, securing code in private repositories, and more.”