Tips, Setups, and Performance Best Practices?

[HariVeeraVenkat]

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Hey everyone! 👋

I've recently started experimenting with GitHub Codespaces and I'm really impressed by the convenience of having a fully configured dev environment in the cloud. That said, I’d love to hear how others are using it and what your setup looks like.

Some questions to get the conversation started:

• 🛠️ How do you customize your .devcontainer setup?
• ⚡ Any performance tips for speeding up container startup or build times?
• 🧩 What extensions or dotfiles have made your experience better?
• 💸 Have you run into pricing or time-out issues, and how are you managing those?
• 📦 Are you integrating Codespaces with CI/CD or deployment workflows?

Feel free to share screenshots, links to your configs, or any lessons you’ve learned.

Thanks in advance — excited to hear how everyone’s using Codespaces to boost their workflow! 🚀

[krisgfx9]

Hey! I’ve been using Codespaces a lot lately too, it’s a game changer, especially for switching between projects without all the local setup problems and setting it/them up.

A few things I’ve picked up:

🛠️ .devcontainer setup:
I keep it pretty lean to avoid slow startups. I base it off the mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/javascript-node image and just add what I need via features. Also, separating runtime tools (like Node or Python) from dev tools in the Dockerfile helps keep things clean.

⚡ Performance tips:
Prebuilds are super helpful — they save a lot of time if your repo is big or has a long install/build step.
I avoid running heavy postCreate commands unless absolutely needed.
Using mounts to avoid reinstalling dependencies across sessions helped reduce container spin-up times too.

🧩 Extensions / dotfiles:
I use the GitHub dotfiles feature to auto-apply my aliases and shell config.
Favorite extensions: GitLens, Prettier, and Docker.
Also started using volta in my setup to pin Node versions across projects.
I would recommend you volta beceuse it runs js tools pretty quickly and it helps a lot, like a lot.

💸
As for this i haven't run into a problem yet and i am not managing it at all haha, i just let it go.

I hope this helps somewhat, since this is the best i can tell you honestly.
I am not giving you any tips for the last bullet point cuz i don't have that much experience with it.
But i gave you as much as i could.

Byeeeee!!!

[Sharique55]

Ever wondered when to use SSH tunnels vs dev containers vs Codespaces vs CloudIDE ?
This below mentioned Github Repo covers them + 7 more remote development methods!
🚀⭐ github.com/Sharique55/remote-dev-methods

Tags

#RemoteDevelopment #DevContainers #SSHTunnel #CloudIDE #VSCode #VPN #VM #GitHubCodespaces #Docker #RemoteDebugging #CloudDevelopment #InfrastructureAsCode #DevOps #DeveloperTools

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[Mayanshh]

I’ve been using Codespaces pretty regularly for side projects and some client work, and honestly, the biggest win for me is not having to spend the first 30 minutes setting up a dev environment — it’s just ready.
For .devcontainer, I keep it as lean as possible and install heavier stuff in post-create scripts so startup is faster. Prebuilding Codespaces for active branches has been a lifesaver too.

I try to keep extensions minimal inside the container — the fewer, the faster. My dotfiles are super basic, just aliases and a clean prompt, nothing fancy that slows things down.

For cost/timeouts, I set aggressive idle limits for personal projects. On team projects, we use prebuilt templates so everyone spins up the same environment quickly without racking up hours.

And yeah, integrating Codespaces with GitHub Actions has saved me a ton of “it works on my machine” headaches — I test in the same environment that gets deployed.

Overall, it just takes a lot of friction out of getting to the actual coding part.

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