Introducing the Coder Registry

Ben Potter

 on September 27th, 2023

Updated on November 13th, 2023

We are excited to announce the launch of the Coder Registry: the new hub for creating and extending Coder templates. Visit registry.coder.com to browse example templates for various clouds and platforms (e.g. AWS EC2, Kubernetes) and modules to integrate with other software & tools (e.g. JupyterLab, JFrog Artifactory).

How it works

With Coder, developers can self-service cloud development environments via Templates. Platform teams build Coder templates with Terraform to define the underlying infrastructure for a workspace. Templates can provision anything as a workspace: EC2 VMs, OpenStack Instances, or ephemeral Kubernetes Pods as workspaces. It’s all configurable via the template!

With the Coder Registry, you can view starter templates for different cloud providers (e.g. AWS) or orchestration platforms (e.g. Kubernetes). Our community can contribute templates as well!

Modules

We discovered that many Coder users build templates that do much more than provision infrastructure. Templates were full scripts of to hook into NFS shares, pre-install IDEs (code-server), configure extensions, and even pre-authenticate users with other third-party tools. The extensibility of templates is great, but leads to a lot of code duplication and maintenance burden.

We decided to extract this functionality using a native Terraform feature: Modules. Launching today, modules are primarily focused on the following categories:

• Web IDEs: code-server, JupyterHub, VS Code Web
• Third-Party Integrations: JFrog Artifactory
• Helpers: Personalize, Dotfiles, Region Parameters, git clone

Vision

We’ve designed Coder v2 to be extensible, giving every organization the integration points to build their unique developer experience. We will continue building official modules and plan to work with our community and ecosystem partners to make the Coder workspace the hub for developer productivity.

This video is from our Coder 2.0 launch webinar. To discover all the exciting announcements from the launch, be sure to register for the complete webinar.

Getting started

If you’re just starting with Coder, browse our example templates in the registry to begin creating workspaces on your preferred cloud!

If you’re a Coder operator, we encourage you to begin using modules! Whether you’re contributing to the registry or managing them in an internal repository, modules are a great way to add new integrations and magic into Coder workspaces! 🪄