Coder v1.18 has been released!

Ben Potter

 on April 22nd, 2021

We are pleased to announce the release of Coder v1.18. Most notably, we have renamed what we previously called environments to workspaces. Other updates include improvements to workspaces templates, workspace provider, and general bug fixes.

Why “workspaces”?

As we continue to expand the functionality that Coder provides, we discovered the term developer environment was limiting and led to confusion, as it can refer to an engineer’s local workstation or a dedicated preview environment that applications are deployed onto.

We switched to the term workspaces to represent a rich and full space that a developer uses for writing and testing code. With Coder, a workspace encompasses the consistent environment for development in the cloud, dev URLs to test and share apps, and multiple IDEs/connection methods.

All of your existing “environments” will still be accessible under the renamed view; this rename does not change the functionality of Coder.

Workspace templates (beta)

We first introduced workspaces templates in Coder 1.17.2 as a new way to define and launch workspaces. This feature can be enabled from the admin settings. In 1.18, we have added more capabilities such as defining dev URLs. See our docs for a full list of options. Stay tuned for more guides on this!

Updates to workspace providers (beta)

Workspace providers make it possible to run Coder in multiple Kubernetes clusters, zones, or even clouds. In 1.18, we have added the CODER_WP_NAME environment variable inside workspaces.

We’ve also included the ability to cordon a Kubernetes workspace provider from the CLI to make it unschedulable.

ℹ️ Note: All workspace providers are type: Kubernetes at this time. Additional providers will be likely be supported in the future.

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See our 1.18 changelog for a full list of changes in this release. To update, see our upgrade instructions. If you haven’t installed Coder yet, you can generate a trial license and give it a shot; we’d love to know what you think!