Adopt dev containers

[LeoDog896]

devcontainers are a rising standard made by Microsoft that allows for opening a modified docker container with development tools to work on a program. The steps for starting up lichess aren't convoluted by any means, but it can be a bit of an annoyance to begin full development in lichess.

devcontainers mainly work with vscode (and respectively github codespaces), and tracking issues are in other popular editors (local & remote):

• Acknowledgement by a JetBrains team member that devcontainer support is coming to Intellij
• The most upvoted issue on gitpod
  • (however, gitpod is still debating about what type of devcontainer support to implement)
• CLI mode (for all terminal fans!)
  and more.

Given that devcontainers work similarrly to gitpod but with local support, it will allow for collaborators to set up an enviornment quickly without having the black or white choice of setting it up manually or using gitpod.

Lichess's lila already has a lila gitpod repository for gitpod configuration. Given that, here's two ideas:

• Adopt strategy similar to lila-gitpod (reccomended)
• Add the .devcontainer folder to lila.

Note: I'm fully open to PRing this myself. If this is acknowledged and accepted by a lichess member, and if no one says otherwise, I'll make a PR for a devcontainer config with parity with the base Linux Onboarding Guide.

[benediktwerner]

I'd definitely be interested in seeing a devcontainers setup. I tried writing some myself before since I'm curious how codespaces compares to gitpod but quickly gave up since there didn't seem to be a nice way to automatically start all the tasks in separate terminals like the gitpod setup does it. But I guess even if that's not possible, it would still be nice to have a setup where you then manually run them or something.

Can't speak for getting it accepted into the repo though. But ig having it in a separate repo like the gitpod one might not be a bad idea anyways?

[LeoDog896]

(In regards to your terminal tasks thing, I'm not sure if dev containers has a way to do it in their config file but i usually configure a .vscode/tasks.json file to set that up, that way in case I accidentally stop any of the tasks I can easily start it up again - I do that for both github codespaces and gitpod).

Otherwise, I do like the defaults of gitpod (e.g. a dark theme or the rust toolchain preinstalled) more than github codespaces's default container but github devcontainers really make up for that because of the potential of running it locally.

I've never had a devcontainer in a different repo, but I think devcontainers have a "monorepo" setup where you can have it clone multiple repositories for work in different ones at the same time, which is perfect for lichess.

[benediktwerner]

Yeah, I also found the suggestion of just using tasks when googling the issue again for a bit before writing my comment but I guess then it'd only work for vscode again. Which I personally don't mind but still a bit unfortunate.

Don't think whether dark theme is the default or what's on the default image is a particularly relevant difference to me 😅 Tbh it does seem like there aren't a whole lot of relevant differences between the two but I'm still curious about the details.

And yeah, for Lichess, you need at least the lila and lila-ws repo anyways. The gitpod setup also does the same thing, cloning both of them + lila-db-seed, fishnet, and lila-fishnet.

[LeoDog896]

Yeah it definitely seems like the best idea to use a separate repo for this, and in regards to the differences, other than the default image, the main difference really just relies on the image itself.