Ben Potter bpmct

Coder Template Development Guide

This guide documents best practices and workflows for developing and iterating on Coder templates.

Understanding Templates

Coder templates are written in Terraform and define the infrastructure required for workspaces. These templates create VMs, containers, and other resources that developers use as their development environments.

Template Development Workflow

Building Coder on Windows - Complete Guide

This guide documents the process of setting up a Windows workspace using Coder and building the Coder repository on it.

Prerequisites

Access to a Coder deployment (e.g., dev.coder.com)
coder CLI installed and authenticated

Step 1: Create a Windows Workspace

Building Coder on Windows - Complete Guide

This guide documents the process of setting up a Windows workspace using Coder and building the Coder repository on it.

Prerequisites

Access to a Coder deployment (e.g., dev.coder.com)
coder CLI installed and authenticated

Step 1: Create a Windows Workspace

Coder added jq to the base image to support mounting secrets from AWS Secrets Manager, or other Kubernetes secrets that are in JSON format. Example:

# Helm values.yaml
coder:
  command:
    - /bin/sh
    - -c     - CODER_PG_CONNECTION_URL=postgresql://coder:$(cat /mnt/postgres-pass/secret.json | jq -r .password)@coder-db.coder.svc.cluster.local:5432/coder /opt/coder server
  volumes:
 - name: "postgres-pass"

React native development with Coder

Other apps we could try later:

Note: I tried with standalone React Rative, but Expo (a beginner-friendly framework) works too. I tried this in 2021 with Coder.

	#!/bin/bash

	# This has been tested on the aws-linux Coder template, which runs Ubuntu Focal

	# Check if LXDE is installed
	if ! dpkg -s lxde &> /dev/null; then
	sudo apt-get update
	DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive sudo apt-get install -y lxde
	else
	echo "LXDE is already installed."