GitHub Codespaces IDE

Codespaces is an integrated developer environment (IDE), which provides you with a VS Code environment with a cloud computing backend. The repository is automatically loaded into your environment and you do not need any additional authentication steps to push to your repo. Read more here about Codespaces.

In this lab, we use Codespaces to get you familiar with the Linux terminal.

You will not use Codespaces for most of your work this semester. If you were just exploring code or making minor changes to a project, Codespaces could be a simple solution.

Launching Codespaces

Open your Git repo for the lab. Launch Codespaces from your repo by clicking on the green code button, then select “codespaces” then click “Create codespace on main”.

Wait for the workspace to be created. It will set up the computing instance with a screen like this.

Linux Terminal in Codespaces

You now have full VS Code capabilities. The terminal in Cloud9 is the lower window. You are connected to a cloud computing instance and are able to run BASH commands (along with other programming languages) there.

Check out the cheat sheet on Linux commands here.