Getting Started

Tooling

This project makes heavy use of dev containers which is a relatively new tactic for what is an age-old problem. A dev container is a container whose image (files, tools, and environment) is already packaged so that development work can proceed without needing a lot of “set up your machine” processes and time.

With VSCode the container is actually run by the editor (really “dev environment” or “IDE”) and the editor knows how to work with the dev container for doing things like running programs, launching the debugger, using the shell inside the container.

What to try

Here is a video that can show you some things to try in the dev container, like running the hello world example.

Github codespaces

You can launch a complete editor and working shell in your browser with parigot’s tooling already configured. You can do this with the codespaces tab under the code button on the github repository.

Example screencap

Althought this is convenient, the machines that back codespace are quite slow, and it can take several minutes to do the launch of a codespace.

Github classic way

• Clone the repo (http://github.com/iansmith/parigot) using git
• Launch vscode on our configured workspace, parigot.code-workspace at the root of the repo. If you have vscode installed in the normal way, you can use code parigot.code-workspace at the root of the repo.
• When you get the popup in the lower right of vscode that says “reopen in dev container” click “Reopen in Container” or other affirmative button.
• You will be given your copy of the repo’s code, plus a shell that is pre-configured to work with parigot, as in the video above.

Screencap of VS Code startup

Other editors

First, VSCode is the recommended way to edit code in parigot simply because it is so much easier.

If you are wanting to use another editor that understands containers, the Dockerfile that builds the dev container is in .devcontainer/Dockerfile and should build on your local copy of Docker. From this point, you’ll have a properly set up image you can use in your editor.

In the past, we have demonstrated that this method works with goland and that one can have an environment much like the VSCode one.

You can also build and run the container image from a terminal shell. To build the image, run:

docker build -t iansmith/parigot .devcontainer

Once you built the image, you will want to start the image by binding the parigot root folder to the path /workspaces/parigot, and start the shell:

docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)":/workspaces/parigot iansmith/parigot

From there, you can run the helloworld example by running make in both the root and examples/helloworld:

# In the docker container
make
cd examples/helloworld
make
runner helloworld.toml