Improve Gitpod automated setup

[jankeromnes]

Hi @paulmelnikow! 👋 I hope you're well, and that you're enjoying the summer. 🌴

I noticed the Shields repo is quite popular on Gitpod (🎉) and I wanted to circle back to ensure the experience is as good as it can be, and finish some of the work items from #2772.

In this Pull Request, I:

1. remove the word "Beta" from README.md, since Gitpod launched officially in April 2019

2. add onOpen: open-preview to the port 8080 specification, so that the Shields web app gets automatically opened in a preview when it starts

3. set up continuously prebuilt workspaces to speed up IDE loading times. This saves 2 minutes every time you start a new workspace, but requires someone to install the (free) Gitpod hook for the Shields repo (it's pretty straightforward, but let me know if you'd like a walkthrough)

4. install the Prettier VS Code extension for Gitpod. This should enable automatic format-on-save with Prettier, but note that there is currently a bug with the Prettier extension, hence the work-in-progress status of this PR

Here is what the Gitpod setup currently looks like today (2min waiting for setup, port 8080 notification):

And here is what it looks like with my PR (0s setup time, web preview instead of notification):

You can try it without merging by opening my fork in Gitpod: https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/jankeromnes/shields

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or questions. 🙂

[shields-ci]

	Messages
📖	✨ Thanks for your contribution to Shields, @jankeromnes!
📖	Thanks for contributing to our documentation. We ❤️ our documentarians!

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[paulmelnikow]

Hi Jan! Hope you're well too! My summer is good – and I actually got to meet Thaddée in Paris a couple weeks ago!

This looks great. I'll wait a couple days to hear from other maintainers before turning on the Gitpod app.

Do you want to wait for the Prettier integration to be fixed before merging this?

[calebcartwright]

I'm onboard with this, and really anything that helps enable/empower folks to work on Shields!

[jankeromnes]

Hi Jan! Hope you're well too!

I'm well too, thanks! 😄

My summer is good – and I actually got to meet Thaddée in Paris a couple weeks ago!

Wow, it's so cool that you got to meet @espadrine! 💯

Do you want to wait for the Prettier integration to be fixed before merging this?

Well, at first I wanted to remove this commit from the PR until the Prettier extension bug is fixed, but after trying again today, I wasn't able to easily reproduce it. So I think the bug is quite rare, and it will get fixed soon, and also I think that having this extension is already an improvement.

But please try it for yourself, if you have time, and if you don't like the experience I can totally remove the extension and re-add it later.

I'm onboard with this, and really anything that helps enable/empower folks to work on Shields!

Thanks a lot Caleb! I'll continue looking for ways to improve the Shields dev experience in Gitpod -- but if you spot or think of anything, please share! #2772 would probably be the best place for ideas/suggestions. 🙏

I've also rebased the PR, and marked it ready for review. Thanks for the feedback!

[calebcartwright]

I know this line was already in here, but wouldn't it be better to have folks direct their Gitpod related bugs/questions/etc. to Gitpod?

I know I wouldn't be the best person to help folks out with Gitpod related questions/issues/etc. and I suspect most of the other Shields maintainers don't have Gitpod expertise either.

[paulmelnikow]

I think that's kind of the goal of that issue, is to funnel people to one place to get help.

Though I think it's true that none of the Shields maintainers are very familiar with Gitpod, and while as a collective we're well-equipped to support Shields in various environments, we're not well-equipped to support Gitpod.

Jan, I wonder if you could clarify what level of support you and/or Gitpod are available to respond to problems people might run into.

We haven't exactly been crushing under a load of support requests; in fact I haven't seen any. Since you say people are using it, they are either managing okay, or not raising issues in any of the Shields forums. Though I do get where the core team is coming from, in setting expectations that this is something where we will need your help to provide support.

[jankeromnes]

Thanks a lot for the additional feedback!

wouldn't it be better to have folks direct their Gitpod related bugs/questions/etc. to Gitpod?

That's an excellent point. And @paulmelnikow is right: that's indeed the goal behind issue #2772. I'm subscribed to it, and will see / be able to reply to any comment posted there.

Jan, I wonder if you could clarify what level of support you and/or Gitpod are available to respond to problems people might run into.

Sure! So for Gitpod-related problems or questions in Shields, please feel free to redirect anyone to #2772, or to @mention me directly in any discussion where you feel my input could be helpful. I'm happy to spend both working hours and personal time on helping out Shields developers with Gitpod. 🙂

Since you say people are using it, they are either managing okay, or not raising issues in any of the Shields forums.

I do hope it's the former! 🤞 We've put significant effort into the Shields/Gitpod dev experience. But if you notice anyone struggling with / being annoyed by something that looks somewhat Gitpod-related, please ping me if possible. 🙏

[calebcartwright]

That helps a lot, thanks for additional the context!

[calebcartwright]

I can't install the app on the badges org, but consider this my 👍 vote for proceeding

[jankeromnes]

I've rebased this Pull Request, and enabled a few more things in the prebuild config:

• also prebuild non-master branches
• also prebuild PRs from forks
• add a comment with Review in Gitpod button to PRs once they're prebuilt (please let me know if that's too noisy)

[jankeromnes]

Also, please let me know if there is anything else I can do here. 🙂

[paulmelnikow]

Going to try to merge this using Ranger (ref #3931).

[shields-deployment]

This pull request was merged to master branch. This change is now waiting for deployment, which will usually happen within a few days. Stay tuned by joining our #ops channel on Discord!

After deployment, changes are copied to gh-pages branch:

[calebcartwright]

@repo-ranger repo-ranger bot merged commit 2f8704f into badges:master

Fantastic!

[jankeromnes]

Cool, thanks a lot @calebcartwright and @paulmelnikow! Seems like Ranger worked well! 🎉 😄

[calebcartwright]

Thanks for this @jankeromnes!

[PyvesB]

Thanks for contributing this piece of work @jankeromnes ! I've been meaning to try out Theia IDE for a while now, doing it through Shields and Gitpod is the perfect opportunity!