[Feature] Easier developer environment setup

[dtaivpp]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

It can be really challenging to setup a developer environment for OpenSearch dashboards. There should be a straightforward way to create a reproducible development environment to assist new contributors.

Describe the solution you'd like

There are several ways this could be achieved but I believe some sort of developer container setup would be the most straightforward as there are several projects already working on this. Codespaces and Gitpod are the two that immediately come to mind.

I am pro-Codespaces as it is integrated nicely into GitHub.

Describe alternatives you've considered

There are several alternatives such as packaging a VM but that is a clunky hard to maintain solution.

Additional context

[ashwin-pc]

@dtaivpp While i like the idea of a reproducible development environment like codespaces, you mentioned that its quite challenging to setup a development environment today for OpenSearch Dashboards. Can you elaborate on that?

The instructions to setup the dev environment is quite simple in my opinion and outlined in the developer guide

We also have a similar issue open to discuss using docker as a dev container to have a reproducible dev environment (#2196)

[joshuarrrr]

I'm not sure exactly what's involved in setting up Codespaces for the project, but I imagine we'd be very interested in a community contribution to help us do that if someone is familiar with it.

[dtaivpp]

To add some data to the thread when I setup an environment with MacOS it took ~ 1.5 hours. There were some things that weren't covered in the documentation which was why it took a bit longer (Installing nvm without brew, nvm install).

After that I tried to spin up a windows dev environment. Took ~50 minutes. Nvm on windows is very rough. There are issues requiring users to modify nvm's settings files, .nvmrc file isn't found, etc. Only reason it didn't take longer is I was aware of windows path limitations.

I think maintaining one install guide along with a single curated development environment would be much smoother. It likely will not have to be updated as it relies on .nvmrc, .node-version, etc for config. Also, it would allow us to get people in a working environment in probably under 5 min which would be good for contributors.

++It also has the benefit of being able to be run as a standalone container for dev

[ashwin-pc]

@joshuarrrr Codespaces uses docker under the hood. We basically need to specify a docker config that has the dev environment setup for the project. its quite simple and a low hanging fruit imo.

@dtaivpp thanks for that context. Yes i'm actually surprised you got it working on mac with our instructions because one of the steps is to use yarn opensearch snapshots which does not work on mac. So I see the value here.

I'm a big fan of local development though, so I would love for us to also take a look into how we can solve this problem for folks who dont want to develop on the cloud. For example when there is spotty internet connections.

[dtaivpp]

@ashwin-pc I agree we should have this work equally well from local and remote containers. I will dig some more and see if anyone has a tool that lets people run them locally easily or if that would take modification.

@joshuarrrr could we/should we add good first issue to this? I feel like this is something fairly straightforward.

[Abyl10]

Dear @dtaivpp and @ashwin-pc,

I wanted to inform you that I have made some updates to the Docker documentation for MacOS related to OpenSearch Dashboards. Could you kindly review the pull request, which can be found at this link: #3694. Thank you for your time and attention.

[abbyhu2000]

Hi @dtaivpp, we have created a Docker dev env set up manual for the new contributors.

The docker setup is accomplished in this PR:#3444

Here is a YouTube demo on the Docker set up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEBExO9mMuU

Here is the Docker manual: https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards/blob/main/docs/docker-dev/docker-dev-setup-manual.md

[dtaivpp]

This is awesome thank you @abbyhu2000!