What is DevSpace?
DevSpace is an open-source command-line tool that enables your team to:
- Build, test and debug applications directly inside Kubernetes
- Develop with hot reloading: updates your running containers without rebuilding images or restarting containers
- Unify deployment workflows within your team and across dev, staging and production
- Automate repetitive tasks for image building and deployment
DevSpace is a client-only, open-source dev tool for Kubernetes. It is
available on GitHub and works with any Kubernetes cluster because it simply uses your kube-context, just like kubectl or helm.
Why DevSpace?
Building modern, distributed and highly scalable microservices with Kubernetes is hard - and it is even harder for large teams of developers. DevSpace is the next-generation tool for fast cloud-native software development.
Standardize & Version Your Workflows
DevSpace allows you to store all your workflows in one declarative config file: devspace.yaml
- Codify workflow knowledge about building images, deploying your project and its dependencies etc.
- Version your workflows together with your code (i.e. you can get any old version up and running with just a single command)
- Share your workflows with your team mates
Let Everyone on Your Team Deploy to Kubernetes
DevSpace helps your team to standardize deployment and development workflows without requiring everyone on your team to become a Kubernetes expert.
- The DevOps and Kubernetes expert on your team can configure DevSpace using
devspace.yaml
and simply commits it via git - If other developers on your team check out the project, they only need to run
devspace deploy
to deploy the project (including image building and deployment of dependencies, i.e. other related projects) to get a running instance of the project or they rundevspace dev
to start developing the project with an automated dev workflow - The configuration of DevSpace is highly dynamic, so you can configure everything using config variables that make it much easier to have one base configuration but still allow differences among developers (e.g. different sub-domains for testing)
Giving everyone on your team on-demand access to a Kubernetes cluster is a challenging problem for system administrators and infrastructure managers. DevSpace Cloud, an optional add-on for DevSpace, makes sharing dev clusters much easier and safer. Learn more about DevSpace Cloud.
Speed Up Cloud-Native Development
Instead of rebuilding images and redeploying containers, DevSpace allows you to hot reload running containers while you are coding:
- Simply edit your files with your IDE and see how your application reloads within the running container.
- The high performance, bi-directional file synchronization detects code changes immediately and synchronizes files immediately between your local dev environment and the containers running in Kubernetes
- Stream logs, connect debuggers or open a container terminal directly from your IDE with just a single command.
Automate Repetitive Tasks
Deploying and debugging services with Kubernetes requires a lot of knowledge and forces you to repeatedly run commands like kubectl get po
and copy pod ids back and forth. Stop wasting time and let DevSpace automate the tedious parts of working with Kubernetes:
- DevSpace lets you build multiple images in parallel, tag them automatically and and deploy your entire application (including its dependencies) with just a single command
- Let DevSpace automatically start port-fowarding and log streaming, so you don't have to constantly copy and paste pod ids or run 10 commands to get everything started.
Works with Any Kubernetes Clusters
DevSpace is battle tested with many Kubernetes distributions including:
- local Kubernetes clusters like minikube, k3s, MikroK8s, kind
- managed Kubernetes clusters in GKE (Google Cloud), EKS (Amazon Web Service), AKS (Microsoft Azure), Digital Ocean
- self-managed Kubernetes clusters created with Rancher
DevSpace also lets you switch seamlessly between clusters and namespaces. You can work with a local cluster as long as that is sufficient. If things get more advanced, you need cloud power like GPUs or you simply want to share a complex system such as Kafka with your team, simply tell DevSpace to use a remote cluster by switching your kube-context and continue working.
Demo
Click here to watch the full-length video with explanations on YouTube [4min]
Features
Stop wasting time for running the same build and deploy commands over and over again. Let DevSpace automate your workflow with:
- Automated Image Building via
devspace build
- Automated Deployment via
devspace deploy
- Efficient In-Cluster Development via
devspace dev
How does it work?
DevSpace reads the configuration file devspace.yaml
which you can simply generate for any of your project via devspace init
. This config file allows you to define:
- which Dockerfiles should be built (either with Docker, kaniko or with a custom build command), how to tag your images and where to store them (e.g. push to Docker Hub or to any private registry)
- how your application should be deployed and with which tools (using helm, kubectl, kustomize or components)
- which dependencies (related projects) need to be deployed (e.g. a microservices from another git repository)
- how your application should be developed within Kubernetes (e.g. configuring log streaming, terminal access, port fowarding, real-time file synchronization or remote debugging)
DevSpace is designed for teams and its configuration is highly paramterizable, so that you can use dynamic config variables within your
devspace.yaml
, commit the config via git together with the rest of your code and share your build, deployment and development workflows with your team mates.