Better container development

openBalena
1

I thought I’d post this for the tinkerers more than anyone.

You may already use Visual Studio Code for development, but do you know about Visual Studio Code - Insiders? They (MS) are beta versioning a set of remote extensions that allow you to develop inside a remote container, so you can test your code live, rather than develop locally and push to the container to test.

As a Python developer, sometimes things just aren’t testable locally in a Windows environment, that need to be deployed to a Linux container running on a Balena Fin, or RPi.

Here’s a good entry into remote development with VSC-I: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers

6

Hey @webtop,

That’s super interesting, thanks for posting. Given the scope of the above, you might also be interested in a feature we’ve just released in beta: https://github.com/balena-io-modules/livepush

This allows your to execute and sync your code and dockerfile changes directly onto a running device. It has a few kinks that need to be worked out, but in general it should work currently for most use cases.

To use it, run balena push <device-ip> --live and watch your changes automatically sync over to your device. We’re very keen to hear on any feedback on this (me especially as I’m lead developer! :slight_smile: )

8

Oh that’s awesome. I’m always tinkering with my build pipeline/process because that’s just how you find stuff :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I’ll let you know if I find any of those “kinks”