Gitpod has 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.

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.

Gitpod streamlines developer workflows and enables a new level of collaboration, allowing teams to build applications more quickly than ever before.

“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.”

Hundreds of thousands of developers are already using Gitpod including engineers from Google, Amazon Web Services and Facebook.