What's New in May 2023

Muhammad Atif Ali

 on June 1st, 2023

In the last few months, we have been working on exciting new features for Coder. We are excited to share them with you today.

Workspace Proxies (Experimental)

Workspace proxies provide low-latency experiences for geo-distributed teams.

Coder's networking makes the best effort to connect directly to a workspace. In situations where this is not possible, such as developing with a web IDE (e.g. Jupyter), workspace proxies reduce latency for developers.

A workspace proxy is a relay connection a developer can use when connecting with their workspace over SSH, a workspace app, port forwarding, etc. Coder automatically selects the best proxy for the developer based on their location and the location of the workspace.

For deployment instructions, see Docs.

Envbox

Envbox is an image developed and maintained by Coder that bundles the sysbox runtime. It works by starting an outer container that manages the various sysbox daemons and spawns an unprivileged inner container that acts as the user's workspace. The inner container is able to run system-level software similar to a regular virtual machine (e.g., systemd, dockerd, etc.). Envbox offers the following benefits over running sysbox directly on the nodes:

• No custom runtime installation or management on your Kubernetes nodes.
• No limit to the number of pods that run Envbox.

Refer to the docs for more information.

Template Editor

Edit & duplicate templates directly from the Coder dashboard. This feature is available to all users with the template-admin or owner role.

Fly.io Starter Template

We have added a new starter template for Fly.io. Fly.io is a platform for running applications globally. It is a great fit for Coder workspaces because it allows you to run them close to your developers. See the blog post here for more information.

Open in Coder

Now you can generate Open In Coder buttons for your templates to provide a one-click experience for your developers. See the docs for more information.

Other Exciting Features

• Ability to use non-localhost addresses with coder port-forward docs
• Add or remove licenses from the dashboard.
• Added support for X11 forwarding in the Coder CLI. docs

For a full chnagelog see our releases on GitHub.