Anatomy of a Coder Workspace

In Coder, software development occurs inside of cloud workspaces, which contain the dependencies, IDEs, and configuration for a development project, just as a developer’s laptop would.

Unlike developing locally, however, workspaces are designed to be reproducible. Developers can switch to a Coder workspace and focus on their projects and the end product, not on setup.

Writing code on a workspace

There are a few ways to connect to and develop on Coder workspace:

• Web IDEs (VS Code, IntelliJ Suite, Jupyter)
• SSH + (VS Code Remote)
• Local file sync (use any IDE)

Learn more about each of these options in our docs.

Workspaces are not your average “container"

Coder is great for developing web apps, but we support a lot of other workloads as well.

If you work develop with Docker, kubernetes, or systemd processes, the recommended Coder setup allows for this workflow. Workspaces are provisioned with the Sysbox container runtime to securely support running these system-level apps inside containers. Unlike traditional containers, Coder Workspaces behave in many ways like virtual machines, but with the efficiency and speed of containers. Note: Coder supports both traditional containers and containers running the sysbox runtime, allowing you flexible options for more restrictive cluster requirements.