Tour Coder

Tour Coder and Set up your first deployment.

For day-zero Coder users, we recommend following this guide to set up a local Coder deployment, create your first template, and connect to a workspace. This is completely free and leverages our open source repository.

We'll use Docker to manage the compute for a slim deployment to experiment with workspaces and templates.

Docker is not necessary for every Coder deployment and is only used here for simplicity.

1. Install Docker

First, install Docker locally.

If you already have the Coder binary installed, restart it after installing Docker.

2. Install Coder daemon

3. Start the server

To start or restart the Coder deployment, use the following command:

coder server

The output will provide you with a URL to access your deployment, where you'll create your first administrator account.

Once you've signed in, you'll be brought to an empty workspaces page, which we'll soon populate with your first development environments.

More information on the Coder Server

A common way to create a template is to begin with a starter template then modify it for your needs. Coder makes this easy with starter templates for popular development targets like Docker, Kubernetes, Azure, and so on. Once your template is up and running, you can edit it in the Coder dashboard. Coder even handles versioning for you so you can publish official updates or revert to previous versions.

In this tutorial, you'll create your first template from the Docker starter template.

1. Choose a starter template

Select Templates to see the Starter Templates. Use the Docker Containers template by pressing Use Template.

You can also a find a comprehensive list of starter templates in Templates -> Create Template -> Starter Templates.

2. Create your template

In Create template, fill in Name and Display name, then select Create template.

TODO:

• add CLI guide for making a new template
• refactor text below to be more beginner-friendly

1. Create a workspace from your template

When the template is ready, select Create Workspace.

In New workspace, fill in Name then scroll down to select Create Workspace.

Coder starts your new workspace from your template.

After a few seconds, your workspace is ready to use.

4. Try out your new workspace

This starter template lets you connect to your workspace in a few ways:

• VS Code Desktop: Loads your workspace into VS Code Desktop installed on your local computer.
• code-server: Opens browser-based VS Code with your workspace.
• Terminal: Opens a browser-based terminal with a shell in the workspace's Docker instance.
• SSH: Use SSH to log in to the workspace from your local machine. If you haven't already, you'll have to install Coder on your local machine to configure your SSH client.

Tip: You can edit the template to let developers connect to a workspace in a few more ways.

When you're done, you can stop the workspace.

6. Modify your template

Now you can modify your template to suit your team's needs.

Let's replace the golang package in the Docker image with the python3 package. You can do this by editing the template's Dockerfile directly in your web browser.

In the Coder dashboard, select Templates then your first template.

In the drop-down menu, select Edit files.

Expand the build directory and select Dockerfile.

Edit build/Dockerfile to replace golang with python3.

Select Build template and wait for Coder to prepare the template for workspaces.

Select Publish version. In the Publish new version dialog, make sure Promote to default version is checked then select Publish.

Now when developers create a new workspace from this template, they can use Python 3 instead of Go.

For developers with workspaces that were created with a previous version of your template, Coder will notify them that there's a new version of the template.

You can also handle change management through your own repo and continuous integration.