Codefresh: Embedding Orion & Docker

Some major and exciting technologies have hit maturity over the past few years among them we (codefresh) were looking at 2 closely - the first is the cloud being the de-facto infrastructure for apps and the 2nd is the vast adoption of Docker as ‘the’ container for apps and microservices.

These two disruptions essentially empower us as developers to instantly setup & clone complex environments. There is a great benefit with having these Dockers based environments not only as the production and staging environments, but also as the standard core development environments. Such practice significantly reduces the frictions both among the individual developers as well as the frictions often found when moving code from development to staging and then to production. It is not a secret that mature companies such as Facebook and Google invested substantial amount of man years in building an internal framework to allow their developers to gain an instant access to remote development environments, a development environments that are as close as possible to the staging & production environments. While both companies have built these framework even before the Docker ‘era’, Docker is, in fact, doing a great job helping teams implement similar concepts in much less efforts.

There are two additional components, though, that are required in order to fully utilize these Docker environments as development environments - the 1st is auto setting of the code base (the relevant git branch) and the other is providing IDE & terminal interfaces. For the first, we have implemented an automated git flow process, for the latter, we have chosen to embed Orion, an open source Web IDE eclipse project. The main reasons behind choosing Orion were, first, the extensibility of Orion - It is a robust framework that is fully extensible on the client side and allows adding plugins hosted on remote domains. It allowed us to build plug-ins, such as auto deployment to heroku, built-in terminals, muti doc views etc… Second, is Orion’s agnosity on the backend, it offers two versions of backend, Java and nodejs. Although few of the recent features in Orion version 8 implemented in the Java backend only, we have found the nodejs backend more compelling for our developers, easy to be set, configured and extended (we have managed to rewrite the backend with nodejs express module in 3 days!). The third is the community, the transparency and the progress we see with every new release of the Orion project, introducing new enhancements, fixing defect etc…

A preview of our extended Orion can be found at each one of the code samples at: www.codefresh.io/labs

Orion embedded in codefresh labs

By leveraging Docker as a container, GitHub as a hosted git (but essentially it can be any git), AWS as infrastructure (same here it can be implemented with other cloud IaaS) and Orion as a web IDE, we have managed to automate the git flow in a way that you can setup an environment in the relevant git context instantly and manage your development pipeline with the least friction possible.

Docker based gitflow

Contact us from any further question contact@codefresh.io.