Dogfooding Guide

This guide explains how to dogfood coder for employees at Coder.

How to

The following explains how to do certain things related to dogfooding.

Dogfood using Coder's Deployment

Go to https://dev.coder.com/templates/coder-ts
1. If you don't have an account, sign in with GitHub
2. If you see a dialog/pop-up, hit "Cancel" (this is because of Rippling)
Create a workspace
Connect with your favorite IDE
Clone the repo: git clone git@github.com:coder/coder.git
Follow the contributing guide

Run Coder in your Coder Workspace

Clone the Git repo [https://github.com/coder/coder](https://github.com/coder/coder) and cd into it
Run sudo apt update and then sudo apt install -y netcat
- skip this step if using the coder template
Run make bin
💡 If you run into the following error:
```
pg_dump: server version: 13.7 (Debian 13.7-1.pgdg110+1); pg_dump version: 11.16 (Ubuntu 11.16-1.pgdg20.04+1)
pg_dump: aborting because of server version mismatch
```
Don’t fret! This is a known issue. To get around it:
1. Add export DB_FROM=coderdb to your .bashrc (make sure you source ~/.bashrc)
2. Run sudo service postgresql start
3. Run sudo -u postgres psql (this will open the PostgreSQL CLI)
4. Run postgres-# alter user postgres password 'postgres';
5. Run postgres-# CREATE DATABASE coderdb;
6. Run postgres-# grant all privileges on database coderdb to postgres;
7. Run exit to exit the PostgreSQL terminal
8. Try make bin again.
Run ./scripts/develop.sh which will start two separate processes:
1. [http://localhost:3000](http://localhost:3000) — backend API server 👈 Backend devs will want to talk to this
2. [http://localhost:8080](http://localhost:8080) — Node.js dev server 👈 Frontend devs will want to talk to this
Ensure that you’re logged in: ./scripts/coder-dev.sh list — should return no workspace. If this returns an error, double-check the output of running scripts/develop.sh.
A template named docker will have automatically been created for you. If you just want to create a workspace quickly, you can run ./scripts/coder-dev.sh create myworkspace -t docker and this will get you going quickly!
To create your own template, you can do: ./scripts/coder-dev.sh templates init and choose your preferred option. For example, choosing “Develop in Docker” will create a new folder docker that contains the bare bones for starting a Docker workspace template. Then, enter the folder that was just created and customize as you wish.
💡 **For all Docker templates:** This step depends on whether you are developing on a Coder v1 workspace, versus a Coder v2 workspace, versus a VM, versus locally. In any case, check the output of the command `docker context ls` to determine where your Docker daemon is listening. Then open `./docker/main.tf` and check inside the block `provider "docker"` that the variable `"host"` is set correctly.

Troubleshooting

My Docker containers keep failing and I have no idea what's going on

✔ Queued [236ms]
✔ Setting up [5ms]
⧗  Starting workspace
  Terraform 1.1.9
  coder_agent.dev: Plan to create
  docker_volume.home_volume: Plan to create
  docker_container.workspace[0]: Plan to create
  Plan: 3 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.
  coder_agent.dev: Creating...
  coder_agent.dev: Creation complete after 0s [id=b2f132bd-9af1-48a7-81dc-187a18ee00d5]
  docker_volume.home_volume: Creating...
  docker_volume.home_volume: Creation complete after 0s [id=coder-maf-mywork-root]
  docker_container.workspace[0]: Creating...
  docker_container.workspace[0]: Creation errored after 0s
  Error: container exited immediately

✘ Starting workspace [2045ms]
terraform apply: exit status 1
Run 'coder create --help' for usage.

Check the output of docker ps -a

If you see a container with the status Exited run docker logs <container name> and see what the issue with the container output is

Enable verbose container logging for Docker:

sudo cp /etc/docker/daemon.json /etc/docker/daemon.json.orig
sudo cat > /etc/docker/daemon.json << EOF
{
        "debug": true,
        "log-driver": "journald"
}
EOF
sudo systemctl restart docker
# You should now see container logs in journald.
# Try starting a workspace again and see what the actual error is!
sudo journalctl -u docker -f

Help! I'm still blocked

Post in the #dogfood Slack channel internally or open a Discussion on GitHub and tag @jsjoeio or @bpmct

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