Best eclipse ever
I recently tried using the #1 open source cloud IDE, Eclipse Che. Here are my thoughts…
Eclipse Che is an innovative take on developer workspaces. Once deployed, you can easily create and provision development workspaces and technology stacks at the click of a button, and it allows you to develop with those stacks without having those dependencies locally. This opens up a new realm of possibilities when it comes to portability and reliability in software development.
I’ll cover the following items in this article.
- Running Eclipse Che with Docker
- Creating a workspace for .NET Core development
- Creating a new Angular project using ASP.NET Core
Running Eclipse Che
It’s really easy to get up and running with Eclipse Che. First, you’ll need to have Docker. Then just run the following command, which specifies a directory to store your workspaces, and also shares access to the Docker daemon. Eclipse Che manages the provisioning of new workspaces and technology stacks directly with Docker.
docker run -it --rm -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /c/che:/data eclipse/che start
Once the container is running successfully, you can browse to the dashboard by going to http://localhost:8080. It should look like the screenshot below.
Creating a workspace
Next we’ll want to create a new workspace that we can do our development in, but we need to pick a stack that we want to develop with. You’ll notice that there are several different stacks to choose from. The different stacks that Che provides makes it easy to get up and running with Java, Kotlin, Swift, Android, Go, Python, Ruby, PHP, and many more. You can also add your own custom stacks.
For this article I chose the .NET Core 2.0 stack.
Once you click the create button, you’ll need to wait for your workspace to be provisioned.
Creating a new project
Once your workspace has been provisioned, you’ll have access to the console. You can create projects using the menu or project explorer, but the dotnet CLI makes it easy to create new projects as well.
Use the following commands to create a new Angular web app, and install the npm dependencies.
mkdir HelloChe
cd HelloChe
dotnet new angular
npm install
Once the dependencies have been installed, feel free to browse the code in the project explorer window. The IDE is powerful, and uses language servers to get intellisense and debugging for C# and other languages.
When you’re ready to test your application, you can just click the run button, or use the following command.
dotnet run
You can access and take backups of your workspaces at the same location you specified in your initial docker run command.
Overall, Eclipse Che offers an interesting perspective on what development environments might look like in the future. I was able to develop an Angular + ASP.NET Core web app from my computer while only having Docker installed. The extensibility and different stacks that are provided really makes it easy to get up and running with just about any language on just about any device. SaaS services like Codenvy that are built on Eclipse Che also make it easy collaborate with teams of developers, and are redefining the way we write code.
