I am just starting into contributing to a tap, and...
# best-practicest
thomas_karbe
01/27/2023, 4:09 PMI am just starting into contributing to a tap, and are faced with a general question: I personally moved away from installing dependencies on my machine to developing in a devcontainer. Since most projects for meltano, taps, targets currently don’t have devcontainer files defined, how does the community feel about adding that? It wouldn’t force contributors to actually use them, but it would open the option for those who prefer that way of working
a
aaronsteers
01/27/2023, 5:09 PMTotally with you. In a recent PR on a tap, I just added my own dev container definition. When I offered to remove it from the PR or move it to another, the maintainers were happy to just keep it in.
aaronsteers
01/27/2023, 5:10 PMBut yes, i personally agree with you it's nice to have the min/default dev experience for the repo already included in the repo
t
thomas_karbe
01/27/2023, 5:11 PMnice to hear! I wasn’t sure how accepted devcontainers are at the moment
a
aaronsteers
01/27/2023, 5:12 PMA community member created and published a "Meltano" dev container project. It would probably be valuable to have one published for "Meltano / Singer Python Connectors". It would also make a great addition to the SDK cookie cutters, I think.
aaronsteers
01/27/2023, 5:13 PMMy opinion (and others can disagree for valid reasons) is that devcontainer definitions aren't intrusive enough to not want them in a project.
aaronsteers
01/27/2023, 5:15 PMCaveat is that, of course, each developer also will have their own workspace preferences and no single dev container would be optimized for every developer's preferences.
I'm interested how IDEs will evolve here, if they'll open up ways for devs to personalize while still starting from the default.
t
thomas_karbe
01/27/2023, 5:18 PMI guess it would be great to have a split in settings here:
• general project settings (e.g. a specific linter) -> to be committed to git
• user specific preferences (e.g. a highlighting IDE plugin) -> gitignore
thomas_karbe
01/27/2023, 5:19 PMand once this becomes a common IDE feature: a common format for devcontainer definitions
a
aaronsteers
01/27/2023, 5:40 PMHere's a simple one I created for
meltano-map-transformaaronsteers
01/27/2023, 5:40 PMSome of those features (bandit?) could possibly be overkill but it works!
aaronsteers
01/27/2023, 5:41 PMAlso it includes Meltano as a dev container feature so the developer can freely use Meltano for testing without having to manually install it
t
thomas_karbe
01/27/2023, 5:45 PMnice one! I usually start with a custom Dockerfile that has
poetry installa
aaronsteers
01/27/2023, 5:48 PMYeah, I'm experimenting with "features" as lightweight attachable components, as an alternative to the standard installation methods. Downside is that they don't (yet?) seem to have the same caching optimizations you get from including in your Dockerfile. Maintenance-wise, I'd rather not support custom Dockerfiles, but performance-wise, I think they still offer the best tuned "load time" after prebuilds and/or build caching are enabled. (Not based on scientific data, just my own anecdotal experiences so far.)
s
Sven Balnojan
01/31/2023, 12:24 PMJust to add my 2 cents, because I’m basically not coding on my laptop anymore at all: Devcontainers are IMHO particularly great because tap & target dependencies are sooo heterogeneous, having things set up already is just a nice thing to have (and Python dependency management is still like an unsolved problem it seems to me sometimes :-D).
t
thomas_karbe
02/01/2023, 1:13 PMyay, more devcontainer fans, no cons so far 😉