Show HN: Lapdev, a new open-source remote dev environment management software

This looks pretty good. Being able to use devcontainers on local server hardware without monthly fees (and&#x2F;or hetzner servers) sounds great.<p>Up until now we’d been making do with docker-compose and JetBrains’s remote SSH dev; this should be significantly better.

I am interested in remote dev environments, but I&#x27;m not super excited about managing yet more software in the cloud.<p>There were some headaches around the exact specifics since it wasn&#x27;t designed for this, but I liked the idea of using skypilot to launch dev machines in the cloud since it has plugins to all the cloud APIs and so you don&#x27;t need to manage a k8s cluster to launch a dev machine. Admittedly it worked better for launching a Jupyter server than a &quot;full&quot; dev machine, but a full dev machine seemed to be just a few ssh&#x2F;vs code configurations away.

A lot of remote dev environments have limitations when it comes to certain types of development. For example, ios and android app development can be tricky. Or game development where you need to have GPUs and build artifacts may be slow to download to your machine.<p>Are there any guidances for how to fix this?

I&#x27;m very interested to learn more about this class of tool. I had seen[0] Coder including alpha support for .devcontainer, but I&#x27;m not aware of other OSS options.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coder.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;v2&#x2F;latest&#x2F;templates&#x2F;devcontainers#devcontainers-alpha" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coder.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;v2&#x2F;latest&#x2F;templates&#x2F;devcontainers#dev...</a>

It&#x27;s always interesting to see new approaches but I don&#x27;t see this replacing Vagrant for my projects any time soon:<p>- Vagrant already supports VM or Container environments, and has a well defined system for building and distributing &quot;base&quot; boxes;<p>- Vagrant uses a Ruby file to define the environment, so it&#x27;s much more powerful than a Yet Another Migraine Looming file.

This isn’t open source; one of the directories is licensed under a proprietary, subscriptionware nonfree license.<p>The remainder is AGPL, which many people (including myself) consider nonfree as well.

Another implementation in that space is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devpod.sh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devpod.sh</a>

I don&#x27;t understand. It&#x27;s installed on a remote server, okay.<p>But does it provide remote environments or local environments ?<p>And what&#x27;s an environment in this context ? A Docker compose file and a .env? Code or vim settings ? A vm à la vagrant ?

Nice! Small design nitpick&#x2F;tip : center the text on your buttons to make them feel more like buttons. Left aligning them makes them look like labels to some. Small tweak, but can result in better conversion.

So, I know very little about this devcontainer spec.<p>Can I just ask, what value does this spec provide that a simple docker image containing the necessary tools does not already provide?<p>Why do we need another layer on top? What am I missing?

Looks like Kasm Workspaces [1] for developers, I&#x27;ll give it a try.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kasmweb.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kasmweb.com&#x2F;</a>

Seems great, coming from having to install code-server(hosted VSCode on remote machines) along side SSH via local VSCode. A better managed experience for both would be pretty neat!

Main current main pain point with devcontainers is to run a gui app remote, wathever I do, the gui opens only on the server. I&#x27;m wondering if this solution can export gui remotely?

Can I connect to the environment over https? I&#x27;m looking for a good solution to use nvim from the browser on my iPad on the go.

Nice, but with a Proxmox setup I can clone an existing VM&#x2F;container (and there are already dozens of templates), point VSCode at it, and I’m done.<p>What does this add, really? It’s not automation (I can automate a couple of clicks in Proxmox), it’s not resource management (Proxmox handles storage, etc.). Is it developer identity? Because that’s the only thing I’d need a (relatively simple) script to deploy SSH keys to an environment.

It&#x27;s open-core <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lapce&#x2F;lapdev&#x2F;blob&#x2F;8eeb3cc3cbbf4c5bf4e79285f974d7ddd3f06ab3&#x2F;lapdev-enterprise&#x2F;LICENSE">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lapce&#x2F;lapdev&#x2F;blob&#x2F;8eeb3cc3cbbf4c5bf4e7928...</a> , if you care about that.

Requirements: Postgres<p>This immediately killed it for me. I need to install a Postgres server just to try out a tool? And if I recommend it to my team, do we need to run and maintain a Postgres instance?<p>OP- you are creating too much work for me. And don’t ask me to use your hosted version, the easiest solution is to use Vs code devcontainers