Coder Community: Our Open-Source Offering
Coder Community is the free-to-use tier of the open-source release of Coder's cloud development environment
Coder Community is the free-to-use tier based on our open-source release of Coder. Coder is a cloud development environment (CDE), it provisions and manages workspaces. Coder’s mission is to onboard developers to a productive, ready-to-use, fully configured cloud development environment. We released Coder as open source because we understand that developers look for transparency, a vibrant community, and low-risk evaluation when adopting a new platform.
The Coder Community project
As developers ourselves, we appreciate the value of working with transparently-developed software that includes an active community outside of its corporate maintainer. So in 2022, Coder released Coder as an open source project under the GNU Affero General Public License.
Since then, we’ve earned almost 9000 stars for this project in GitHub. Small and large developer teams have discovered us and set up their own trial on their existing infrastructure. With Coder Community, there’s no need to contact a sales person for a license key or sign up for trial subscription.
We’re proud of the participation from like-minded developers that has grown for Coder. People can audit the code themselves to identify bugs and submit enhancements with issues. And they can join in on discussions on GitHub and Discord.
We’re also proud of the substantial ecosystem of related projects. Coder hosts over 100 other open source repos with over 90,000 stars so far on GitHub. These tools support Coder and give back to the community. Our most popular repo by far is code-server, which runs VS Code in the browser on any machine anywhere.
Made by developers to solve developer problems
Coder was started by developers, and is still maintained by many of the same developers, to solve a developer's problem: provide a great experience by applying the cloud’s flexibility, scalability, and stability to development environments.
Even a small development team runs into “works on my machine”. Achieving a consistent dev environment for each developer means manually documenting the setup process. But this documentation only works when it’s actively maintained and everyone follows it consistently.
Large enterprise teams, on the other hand, soon learn that traditional methods such as local development, VDI, and shared VMs are less than ideal. For example, VDI uses expensive compute resources, including OS licensing, and suffers from a laggy local experience when working through a remote desktop client.
We made Coder to solve these and bigger problems for developers. Cloud technologies offer proven solutions to add flexibility, performance, scalability, and stability to software. Coder brings those benefits to software development itself:
- Developers: Click a button to get coding in seconds with a ready-to-use development environment in the cloud. Developers work from their preferred local IDE, editor, or even just ssh.
- Enterprise: Deploy, monitor, and manage dev environments in the cloud, will full control over security and cost, from a consistent, cohesive, single place.
- Self-hosted: Coder’s flexibility includes choices for the infrastructure to deploy it on. You can install it in minutes on your laptop and you can scale it on a hyperscaler for hundreds of geographically-dispersed developers. Either way it’s the same Coder.
- Cloud-native: Coder is designed and built from the ground up for the cloud. It doesn’t depend on proprietary third-party software. It uses and works with established, proven cloud and open source technologies. These includes Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Tailscale, OAuth, git, and ssh.
Coder is great for small teams
Startups, lone developers, hobbyists, and educators use Coder to give themselves the convenience and simplicity of starting up their development environments consistently and quickly.
Set up for small teams or even a single person is fast. You can install Coder on macOS, Windows, or Linux, on your laptop or your homelab, and get coding in minutes. You don’t need expertise in deploying cloud services and interconnecting them.
Coder Community fits a small team’s budget. There are no licensing fees, no subscriptions. As for hardware, even a modest laptop can run an IDE locally with snappy performance. To host the workspaces, use your on-prem hardware. Or, if you don’t have the budget for expensive hardware on-premises, then run workspaces in the cloud and pay for it only when the developer is at the keyboard.
Developers don’t need to install anything besides a browser and their preferred IDE. Or if they choose, they don’t even need an IDE. With code-server, developers can work from a browser-based IDE on a laptop or even a tablet.
Coder is for the enterprise too
Coder Community is for the enterprise, too. CDE adoption is a big undertaking for hundreds or thousands of developers.
First, there's no cost to trying out Coder Community. Start with a small pilot project then safely, effectively iterate toward a more mature adoption that really takes advantage of cloud-based development.
That means that there’s no initial hurdle of getting budget approval for licensing Coder or any other proprietary software. Trying it out can be as simple and straightforward as finding some spare compute and storage in your data center then installing Coder.
Deploying and administering Coder is straightforward too. There are no new or obscure systems to learn. Your platform team works with what they know, and onboarding new platform engineers is faster.
Most likely, your platform engineering team has security requirements. They can confirm their security concerns by checking out the Coder repo, it’s publicly available. They can also follow the progress of issues, pull requests, and discussions.
When you reach the point where you need Coder's enterprise features, like RBAC or specific customizations, we're ready to help with Coder Premium, which is based on the same code as Coder Community.
Try it out now
We’ve made it as easy as possible to deploy Coder. Here’s a quick way to try it out now.
What you need:
- A spare macOS, Windows, or Linux machine to host Coder.
- Optional: Another machine to develop from. You can also use the same machine that hosts Coder.
- A few minutes.
Step 1: Install Coder
Follow the Quick Start section. It asks you to install Docker which you’ll use to run workspaces on the same machine that hosts Coder. You’ll also create a new template from the Docker starter template. Coder works with any other runtime platform, local or remote, but Docker is easy to set up.
Step 2: Install an IDE
Install the VS Code IDE on the local machine you’ll be developing on. Coder’s starter templates enable VS Code by default. You can use the IDE on the same machine as Coder, or on any other machine that has a network connection.
Coder handles secure networking for you so there’s no need to modify network configuration to connect a local IDE to a remote instance of Coder.
Step 3: Start coding!
During your Coder installation, you got a unique URL to your new Coder instance. In your web browser, sign in (if you aren’t already).
In the Coder web UI, select the Templates tab, select your new template, then select Create Workspace.
Fill out the form to name your new workspace then select Create Workspace. It takes a minute or two to start a workspace for the first time because Coder needs to build the environment from scratch. After that, starting the same workspace takes just a few seconds.
When the workspace is running, you’ll see its page in the Workspaces tab. To connect VS Code to your workspace, just select VS Code Desktop.
The workspace has other choices to connect to it, including code-server, which is a great solution for small teams to work on limited workstations like tablets. And it’s great solution for enterprises to provide dev environments to contractors without needing to supply expensive laptops.
When you’re done with your workspace, select Stop in the workspace’s web page. Coder tears down the workspace for you. You can return to it any time by going to the Workspaces tab.
We make Coder Community for you
Coder gives developer teams a great experience by taking advantage of the cloud’s flexibility, scalability, and reliability. We made Coder Community an open source project to make it simple for you to try, inspect, deploy, and contribute to.
- Learn more about Coder, including installing it and setting up templates: Coder Docs
- Check out the code: Coder repo
- Check out related projects that Coder hosts: Coder on GitHub
- Browse templates and modules to extend Coder workspaces: Coder Registry
- Connect with the Coder community: Discord, Discussions
- Subscribe to Coder's newsletter below
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