DevPod 0.5.5 Release: What's New?

Hrittik Roy

May 1, 2024

4 Minute Read

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DevPod has a new version v0.5.5, with a bunch of noteworthy features and fixes. 🎉 The complete list of bug fixes and features can be found on the GitHub Release Page, but we are here to talk about the most exciting updates.

Without further ado, let’s dive into these features.

GitHub Metrics

Since the last release, around 1500 more users have stargazed DevPod. Moreover, users are contributing features and Providers, making DevPod helpful for everyone

With the existing providers and a total of 10 Community providers, there are more providers for you to use to launch your workspaces in different infrastructures. Curious about what these ten providers are? Here’s the list:

Provider Update Notifications

The list of providers is increasing with every version. Most users use more than one provider. With all these providers, it can be challenging to remember which one to update and when there’s a new version. With DevPod v0.5.5, you’ll get a notification on your UI prompting you for an update on the notification tab:

The provider view also shows you a banner for the update:

Updating is a one-step process; you can read more in the documentation. You can also just click the update button :D

More Powerful UI

The initial DevPod UI was good enough to launch workspaces, delete and recreate them. However, with new power users using DevPod, there were new challenges and requirements. I am happy to share this release introduces new UI actions:

Bulk Stop and Delete:

Now, you can delete and stop many workspaces together with ease:

Filters for workspaces - by Status and/or Provider

Filter workspaces easily by their provisioning status or the type of providers your workspace use:

Sorting based on the Created and Used timestamps

With many workspaces, it’s complicated to find the one you just created. Not anymore, with filtering based on created and used timestamps.

Rebuilding Devcontainers

When you rebuild the workspace, the file system isn’t affected, and the instance is recreated. Now you can rebuild a workspace while re-downloading all the contents of your repositories easily with the new –reset flag. The flag helps you download your content again in addition to rebuilding the devcontainer and can be used as `devpod up .. –reset`.

The existing behaviour of –recreate (only rebuild) doesn’t change, where only the workspace is created without changing its contents. You can choose whatever is better for your specific instance with the options.

Injecting environment variables using a .env file

A new feature in this release is the flexibility to use extra environment variables for your workspaces.

The release introduces `–workspace-env-file` flag. With this flag, injecting environment variables into the workspace from a `.env` file is easier.

VSCode Insiders is now here

There’s one more IDE for DevPod users to use. The highly requested experimental support for VSCode Insiders is here. It’s enabled by default, but you can always change it in Settings > Experimental > Experimental IDEs.

CLI Additional flags

You can now add additional command-line interface flags to the DevPod up feature from your desktop application. Navigate to Settings > Experimental > CLI Additional flags. This allows you to use flags easily and reliably.

Next Steps

You have covered the most critical updates with that. However, there is more, which you can read in the Release Notes.

If you haven’t yet upgraded your instance to get these latest changes, go to your Desktop Application, click Settings, select Upgrade, and follow the steps. For more information, read the DevPod docs.

Also: