Open in Coder

You can embed an "Open in Coder" button into your git repos or internal wikis to let developers quickly launch a new workspace.

How it works

To support any infrastructure and software stack, Coder provides a generic approach for "Open in Coder" flows.

1. Set up git authentication

See External Authentication to set up Git authentication in your Coder deployment.

2. Modify your template to auto-clone repos

The id in the template's coder_external_auth data source must match the CODER_EXTERNAL_AUTH_X_ID in the Coder deployment configuration.

If you want the template to clone a specific git repo:

# Require external authentication to use this template data "coder_external_auth" "github" { id = "primary-github" } resource "coder_agent" "dev" { # ... dir = "~/coder" startup_script =<<EOF # Clone repo from GitHub if [ ! -d "coder" ] then git clone https://github.com/coder/coder fi EOF }

Note

The dir attribute can be set in multiple ways, for example:

  • ~/coder
  • /home/coder/coder
  • coder (relative to the home directory)

If you want the template to support any repository via parameters

# Require external authentication to use this template data "coder_external_auth" "github" { id = "primary-github" } # Prompt the user for the git repo URL data "coder_parameter" "git_repo" { name = "git_repo" display_name = "Git repository" default = "https://github.com/coder/coder" } locals { folder_name = try(element(split("/", data.coder_parameter.git_repo.value), length(split("/", data.coder_parameter.git_repo.value)) - 1), "") } resource "coder_agent" "dev" { # ... dir = "~/${local.folder_name}" startup_script =<<EOF # Clone repo from GitHub if [ ! -d "${local.folder_name}" ] then git clone ${data.coder_parameter.git_repo.value} fi EOF }

3. Embed the "Open in Coder" button with Markdown

[![Open in Coder](https://YOUR_ACCESS_URL/open-in-coder.svg)](https://YOUR_ACCESS_URL/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/workspace)

Be sure to replace YOUR_ACCESS_URL with your Coder access url (e.g. https://coder.example.com) and YOUR_TEMPLATE with the name of your template.

4. Optional: pre-fill parameter values in the "Create Workspace" page

This can be used to pre-fill the git repo URL, disk size, image, etc.

[![Open in Coder](https://YOUR_ACCESS_URL/open-in-coder.svg)](https://YOUR_ACCESS_URL/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/workspace?param.git_repo=https://github.com/coder/slog&param.home_disk_size%20%28GB%29=20)

Pre-filled parameters

5. Optional: disable specific parameter fields by including their names as

specified in your template in the disable_params search params list

[![Open in Coder](https://YOUR_ACCESS_URL/open-in-coder.svg)](https://YOUR_ACCESS_URL/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/workspace?disable_params=first_parameter,second_parameter)

Example: Kubernetes

For a full example of the Open in Coder flow in Kubernetes, check out this example template.