Earlier this year, GitHub announced a few new features during its Satellite 2020 event to help developers across the globe. One of these new features is Codespaces, which GitHub calls “your instant dev environment.”

The goal of Codespaces is to allow anyone to instantly start up a dev environment so they can contribute to any project right away, with all the necessary tools and dependencies set up and ready to use.

“Codespaces is an online development environment, hosted by GitHub and powered by Visual Studio Code, that allows you to develop entirely in the cloud.” — GitHub

After recently receiving access to the limited beta, I’ve tested out this fun new way to code and I’m happy to say it works wonderfully.

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How It Works

Screenshot by the author.

By going to any GitHub repository and clicking three buttons, you’ll be taken to a working VS Code window in your browser within about 30 seconds. In this one tab, it’s possible to code, build, test, and deploy faster than ever before.

The possibilities are extended even more with a ready-to-go terminal and the ability to install VS Code extensions within your codespace. You can even connect to a codespace in VS Code on your own machine using the Visual Studio Codespaces extension.

Repositories can also have specific settings to further customize Codespaces, including automatically installing extensions, forwarding ports, and more. This is done in a new devcontainer.json file and is documented nicely.

One benefit of using Codespaces is that new developers can be ready to help out in just a few seconds, with fewer errors along the way. New contributors can instantly have access to all the tools and info needed to make their first commit to a project.

Take a look at this clip from the Satellite 2020 keynote for a live demo of Codespaces:

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