Gitpod Fundamentally Changes Development Workflows with the Industry’s First Open Source Solution for Automated, Pre-built Dev Environments

Gitpod is open sourcing its platform for automatically spinning up ready-to-code development environments for any GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket project, saving developers dozens of hours per week


KIEL, Germany, Aug. 25, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gitpod, providers of automated dev environments, today announced that they have open sourced a new class of cloud-based IDE that fundamentally changes how software developers build applications. Architected by Sven Efftinge, the co-creator of Eclipse Theia, Gitpod allows developers to maintain dev environments as code, thus turning highly manual steps into a machine-executable part of the project’s source code. Gitpod significantly streamlines developer workflows and enables a new level of collaboration, allowing teams to build applications more quickly than ever before. Hundreds of thousands of developers are already using Gitpod, including engineers from Google, Amazon Web Services and Facebook.

“These days, developers are dealing with complex polyglot projects composed of many microservices. With such cloud-native architectures, setting up and managing dev environments becomes extremely challenging,” said Sven Efftinge, Co-Founder and CEO of Gitpod. “Gitpod allows developers to start coding instantly with a single click from any branch, issue, and from any merge and pull request respectively. Think CI/CD applied to dev environments.”

Similar to a CI system, Gitpod watches changes in the repository and prepares dev environments on every change. That preparation not only includes setting up the tools and checking out the right git branch, but more importantly compiling the code, downloading all dependencies and initializing everything else needed to become productive. When a developer is ready to start working, they get a fresh, ready-to-code dev environment within seconds.

Developers spend significant time manually managing a single dev environment on their local machine and waiting for builds and tests to complete before coding on a daily basis. Gitpod automates the creation of development environments. Unlike other solutions like GitHub’s Codespaces (currently in beta), Gitpod is open source, can be self-hosted, and is the only solution that works with almost any code-hosting platform including GitLab, GitHub Enterprise, and Bitbucket.

The key benefits Gitpod provides software development teams include:

  • Shorter lead times - Gitpod eliminates many hours per week per developer by reducing the time it takes to switch contexts and maintain dev environments.
  • Eliminates configuration “drift” - Gitpod embraces the GitOps approach by versioning its configuration in the Git repository. This ensures consistent and reproducible dev environments for the entire team.
  • Enables remote collaboration - Gitpod provides an easy means for remote teams to securely collaborate during development, including Code Reviews, mentoring, and sharing reproducible snapshots of work accomplished. This is especially important since the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many teams to work remotely. Gitpod also enables developers to use any device, including Chromebooks or iPads, even for complex work that once required expensive, high-powered PCs.

“Gitpod is the ‘missing piece’ in the DevOps automation puzzle,” said Mirko Novakovich, CEO of Instana. “Teams are already automating their pipelines; automating fully prebuilt, ready-to-code development environments completes this process and saves a lot of time.”

Many open-source projects have already embraced Gitpod’s new frictionless development experience, so that anyone can contribute with just a single click. Gitpod has been recommended for use by both the Dev.to and freecodecamp development communities and is available today for free. For more information about Gitpod, or to begin contributing, please visit www.gitpod.io, or email info@gitpod.io.

About Gitpod by TypeFox
The team at Gitpod.io is driven to enable all professional development teams to immediately start working and collaborating in a fully prebuilt, secure dev environment on any project, any branch, with any device, at any time. Gitpod invented the notion of pre-builds allowing users to describe dev environments as code and get an immediately productive development environment for any GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket project. The company is founded by experienced developer tools experts from TypeFox GmbH that worked together for 10+ years creating programming languages and growing open source communities (Xtext, Theia). Gitpod, a remote-first company, operates a battle-hardened product and leads the pack of fully-functional Cloud Dev Environments with more than 200k registered developers.

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Media Contact:
Nichols Communications for Gitpod
Ray George
ray@nicholscomm.com
+1 650-922-3825