What are Workspaces?

A workspace in DevPod is a containerized development environment, that holds the source code of a project as well as the dependencies to work on that project, such as a compiler and debugger. The underlying environment where the container runs will be created and managed through a DevPod provider. This allows DevPod to provide a consistent development experience no matter where the container is actually running, which can be a remote machine in a public cloud, localhost or even a Kubernetes cluster.

To configure the development container, DevPod reuses the devcontainer.json specification, which is also used by other popular tools, such as VS Code dev containers or Github Codespaces. This means you can already reuse projects that use this configuration to spin up a workspace in DevPod. If no configuration is found, DevPod will automatically try to find out what programming language is used and provide an appropriate template.

A workspace in DevPod can be stopped and restarted without losing its state. This allows you to install additional programs or change configuration without the need to reconfigure the container. Depending on the Provider, DevPod will also automatically determine when a workspace is currently not be used and shutdown any unused resources to save costs.