[che-dev] Single-User Eclipse Che in a Vagrant VM for local/offline deve

[Olivier Berger <olivier.berger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi.

I'm new to the Eclipse Che, but not exactly new to Eclipse [0]. Excuse
me in advance for any rudeness ;-)


Let me share a little experiment I've been working on for a few days :

 https://gitlab.com/olberger/vagrant-minikube-eclipse-che/-/tree/single-user

In that repo, I've assembled a Vagrant environment which will run
Eclipse Che in single-user mode, inside a VirtualBox VM.

Supposedly, this makes it a portable Eclipse Che environment to be used
"off-line".


My use-case is to standardise software development labs for our
students, which can both be used on-line on an on-premise (?) k8s
cluster, or locally on their laptops at home or elsewhere, for cases
where the connection may not always be good for working over the Web.

This seems an interesting experiment in the context of the current
lockdown situation when students are possible quite remote from our
academic premises.

Of course an alternative could be to install Eclipse locally on their
laptops... but I kinda feel that it's probably better to standardize the
learning labs environments with devfiles, instead of asking students to
reinstall a bunch of Eclipse plugins manually.

The choice of Vagrant, VirtualBox and the fixed-path hostpath PV storage
make it possible to halt/restart the VM without losing work, in
principle (needs more testing), whatever OS my students may be running.

Under the hood, it uses minikube + chectl for deployment, but Vagrant is
the driver for the VM, while minikube runs with 'none' driver.

There may be plenty of other use-cases or options, YMMV ;)


I hope this experiment makes some sense, and would appreciate your
feedback.


Btw, thanks for the excellent code, support and good athmosphere in the
community, for a newcomer ;-)

Best regards,


[0] https://projects.eclipse.org/content/olivier-berger-committer-lyo
-- 
Olivier BERGER
https://www-public.imtbs-tsp.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP 2048R/0xF9EAE3A65819D7E8
Ingenieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut Mines-Telecom, Telecom SudParis, Evry (France)