Introduction

Lapdev is a self hosted application that spins up remote development environments on your own servers or clouds. It scales from a single machine in the corner to a global fleet of servers. It uses Devcontainer open specification for defining your development environment as code. If you’re interested in a deep dive into how Lapdev works, you can read about its architecture here.

Why Lapdev?

• Self hosted with ease: Lapdev is designed to be self hosted with minimum efforts for installation and maintenance. The application is designed to just work, sparing you from digging too deep into the internals for troubleshooting.

• Horizontal scalability: With a simple yet powerful architecture, Lapdev can scale from a single machine to a fleet of servers, so that you can have a development environment management system that can grow with your developer teams.

• Development Environment as Code: Using the Devcontainer open specification, Lapdev allows you to define your development environment as code. This empowers you to standardize development environments that can be replicated across different developers, avoiding environment related issues and ensuring a consistent setup for everyone.

• Save Onboarding Time: Onboarding developers to new projects don't need hours or days to prepare the environment on their machines. They can start to code instantly.

Planned Features

• More workspace types: Currently Lapdev only supports container based workspaces, which has its own limitations for example when you want to run a k8s cluster in your development flow. It's planned to have support for more than containers. VMs and bare metal machine support are on the roadmap. And more OS support is planned as well, e.g. when you are developing a cross platform desktop application for Windows, Linux and macOS, Lapdev can spin up development environments on all of them and you can develop and debug from the same local machine without the need to switch machines.

Open Source and Open Standard

The Lapdev core code is open sourced under the AGPL V3 license, with selected features gated under an Enterprise License.

Before Lapdev, we developed two other open source projects: a code editor Lapce and a native UI toolkit Floem. Developer environment management software is a crucial component for enhancing developer velocities. We would not have opted for proprietary software for this purpose ourselves, so it is only logical for us to open source the core code of Lapdev.

To sustain the development of our open source projects, we've introduced enterprise licensing for certain features. This enables us to generate revenue that directly supports the ongoing enhancement of Lapdev and our broader open source initiatives.

Beyond open source, we also favour open standards. We’ve adopted the devcontainer specification for the definition and configuration of the development environment. The standard is already supported by popular tools like VSCode, Codespaces and Devpod. We believe it’s beneficial for developers to have a single format to define their development environment as code, and to be able to use it across different tools.