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WebSight Codespaces

Develop WebSight with Codespaces

Placeholder for the author image

Michał Cukierman
Dec 1 2022 12 min read

What is GitHub Codespaces

GitHub Codespaces is a dev environment in the cloud. It looks very similar to Visual Studio Code and can be used to spin up fully configured dev environments in the cloud that starts in seconds. It comes together with preconfigured tooling, like Docker and Java, and it's all that we need to start working with WebSight instantly.

Starting and running the project

The easiest way to set up the project and start Dockerized ephemeral environment is to follow the steps:

  1. Go to https://github.com/websight-io/starter and fork the project

Fork the CMS project

  1. Create Codespace on main branch

Create Codespace for the project

  1. The new window with the project on online IDE should open

Create Codespace for the project

  1. Check the Java version installed on the container using the command:

java --version

and update to Java 17 using SDKMan if needed

sdk install java

  1. Go to the terminal and build the project with

mvn clean install
Build Codespace project

  1. cd to environment/local and start WebSight with

docker compose up
Start Docker Compose

Codespaces automatically forwards declared ports using the generated domain. In our case, the ports are:

Table with ports

Usage

To open WebSight CMS and Nginx hosted sites, navigate to Ports tab and click on the link you want to visit. Author link is the one next to 8080 port

Link to Author instance

New tab should open and you should be able to log in. Default credentials are wsadmin/wsadmin, but you can change it directly in Codespaces.

Login on the author

After logging in you can use WebSight, edit and publish pages directly on GitHub:

an screenshot presenting the Page editor

Summary

Containerization brings us new possibilities, and setting up dev environments in seconds is just one of them. I really like the way Codespaces works, and I believe it can gain more popularity in the future.