Spaces Dev Mode (feature preview)

Members of this organization have early access to the new "Dev Mode" feature on Spaces.

About Dev Mode

When the "Dev mode" is enabled on Space, you can connect to it using SSH or VS Code.

You can make changes to your application code, run some debug tools, ...

Changes reflect to your Space after you hit the "Refresh" button.

When you are done, you can persist your changes using git as you would normally do when developping locally.

How to enable the dev mode

Go to your Space's settings and click on "Enable dev mode".

Limitations

The dev mode is currently not available for static Spaces.

Docker Spaces

Dev mode is supported for Docker Spaces. However, your Space needs to comply with the following rules for the Dev mode to work properly.

1. The following packages must be installed:

• bash (required to establish SSH connections)
• curl, wget and procps (required by the VS Code server process)
• git and git-lfs to be able to commit and push changes from your dev mode environment

2. Your application code must be located in the /app folder for the dev mode daemon to be able to detect changes.

3. The /app folder must be owned by the user with uid 1000 to allow you to make changes to the code.

4. The Dockerfile must contain a CMD instruction for startup. Checkout Docker's documentation about the CMD instruction for more details.

Example of a compatible Dockerfile

This is an example of a Dockerfile compatible with Spaces dev mode.

It installs the required packages with apt-get, along with a couple more for developer convenience (namely: top, vim and nano). It then starts a NodeJS application from /app.

FROM node:19-slim

RUN RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get install -y \
      bash \
      git git-lfs \
      wget curl procps \
      htop vim nano && \
    rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

WORKDIR /app
COPY --link --chown=1000 ./ /app
RUN  npm ci 

CMD ["node", "index.mjs"]