Build Before Installing: Zephyr Dev Environment Using Codespaces - Mike Szczys, Golioth

The Zephyr® Project strives to deliver the best-in-class RTOS for connected resource-constrained devices, built to be secure and safe. Click here to learn more: www.zephyrproject.org
Build Before Installing: Zephyr Dev Environment Using Codespaces - Mike Szczys, Golioth
Putting a fully-configured build environment in front of a new users is the best way to get people using your code. This is one place where Zephyr tends to struggle, as the full install is a project in itself. We recently adopted GitHub Codespaces to stage build environments. This lets any user open VS Code in a browser tab and immediately start building Zephyr samples. Codespaces is a Virtual Machine based approach run by GitHub. Once configured, your custom development environment can be launched by anyone with one click of a button. In this talk I’ll show how Golioth moved our Zephyr training to this approach using 23-lines of code. We’ll cover what works well-our code, the Zephyr tree, and compilers all ready to use-and the one thing that doesn’t-USB connectivity. From this humble beginning, let’s explore the potential of this approach, and how to work around any shortfalls you encounter. This isn’t meant to replace local installs. But it is one more tool to help tempt future Zephyr users to take the plunge and give the project a try.