We’re excited for you to be part of the growing community of Coder users, and we wanted to provide an onboarding guide to ensure you have a great experience. Coder’s documentation is publicly editable, so please feel free to contribute and provide feedback as you desire.

If you're participating in our hosted beta, please see our guide on getting started. If you're deploying Coder to your own clusters, please proceed with this article.

Set up and deploy Coder

To get started with Coder, you’ll need to deploy Coder to a Kubernetes cluster. We have documentation to help you create a cluster if needed. Once you have a cluster, you can install Coder via Helm.

Configure Coder

After you deploy Coder, you’ll need to upload your license file before you can configure the application (you can get a trial license for free here). Once logged in, you’ll be able to access the administration management menu to set up things such as access controls with OpenID Connect (OIDC), create organizations, and create an OAuth app for your users to connect to your Git provider.

At a minimum, you’ll want to ensure you add a container registry for your development environments to pull from, and import an image with the tools your developers need. You can create custom images for your developer workspaces as well.

Provision users

With some base configuration done, you’ll want to allow your developers to begin using Coder. You can manually create and invite users, or you can set up OpenID Connect (OIDC) with Azure AD or Okta. If you are using another Identity Provider (IdP), the process should be very similar. With OIDC configured, Coder will automatically create a user and add them to the default organization when a developer logs in for the first time.

Automate

Coder has a command-line (CLI) tool that you and your developers may be interested in using to interact with Coder. The CLI is completely open-sourced, and we always welcome contributions. Additionally, Coder has a public API that you can use to automate various tasks through code.

Connect local IDEs

While Coder supports a variety of IDEs in the browser, such as VSCode and the JetBrains product suite, some developers may want to use their local installation of these tools or other IDEs with Coder. By leveraging the Coder CLI, developers will be able to connect their terminal to the remote environment’s terminal, and enable file sync to have their local directory’s tree sync with the remote file system.

Maintain and update

Coder maintains a public changelog and release calendar to help you stay in the know on features, bug fixes, security updates, and breaking changes that are coming. Coder releases are available on the third Wednesday of each month, and patch releases are published and available as needed.

Interact with Support

Coder’s standard support is included with your license. You can reach us at [email protected], and one of our engineers will be able to assist. Please include any relevant logs, error messages, or screenshots.

Coder also has a public community Slack you can join if you’d like.

Finally, Coder offers premium support through Coder Escalation Services, which provides a faster response Service-Level Agreement (SLA). Speak to your account executive if you’re interested in this option.

Additional information

There are a variety of ways to follow Coder to stay up-to-date on company updates, whitepapers, blog posts, and more.

Finally, we encourage you to look through the various Guides in our public documentation, as it contains more detailed information on specific use cases and topics.

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