Adds a dev container

[samruddhikhandale]

Hi 👋

I am Samruddhi, a Software Engineer for GitHub, working with the GitHub Codespaces team, and a maintainer for the dev containers org 👩‍💻

Thank you @helen for doing all the ground work for setting up a dev container (ref: #3670). This PR is greatly inspired from the contents of #3670 with few tweaks.

Thanks,
Samruddhi

Trac ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/57187

[github-actions]

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[helen]

Just leaving some minor nits as suggestions to be commited :)

[peterwilsoncc]

Just a couple of suggestions for the getting started section of the readme. Coming to Codespaces as a complete n00b caught me out on the first attempt.

Once a contributor closes their VS Code browser window, how long does the Codespace remain active for? It could be handy to provide advice on how to avoid burning minutes if they are active for an extended period of time.

This is great, it was lovely being able to test the PR via the code dropdown on the PR. Love it!

[samruddhikhandale]

Once a contributor closes their VS Code browser window, how long does the Codespace remain active for?

By default, codespaces time out after 30 minutes of inactivity. When a codespace times out it is stopped and will no longer incur charges for compute usage.

Doc reference - here

@peterwilsoncc Let me know if this info would be helpful in the doc, happy to add that.

[peterwilsoncc]

@samruddhikhandale Given the default spend limit is set to zero, I think it's fine to leave it out for now. It's easy enough to add something later if it becomes an issue.

[carlomanf]

Maybe some people who are unfamiliar with codespaces would be interested to know that I have been using a codespace to develop a plugin for the plugin directory, and the youth of the product absolutely shows. I have been hit by two major outages in little over a month, the latest one being ongoing for more than 48 hours and preventing me from releasing a new version to the plugin directory. The outage was reported as resolved, but either you are not testing closely enough, or deliberately misreporting to hide the high duration of downtime. The support ticket I submitted for the previous outage took 7 days to be answered, so I'm expecting 7 full days of downtime and 7 days delay to a plugin release that should already be completed by now. With service like this, there is no chance I will upgrade to the paid tier anytime soon. Not voting down this patch at all, but I wouldn't be encouraging the events team to jump into codespaces with both feet just yet, or it could result in an attendee's whole contributor day being wasted.

I actually think WordPress Playground would be a better long-term solution for this purpose, but it too obviously has a long way to go.

[helen]

Hi @carlomanf - totally understood that you've experienced frustrations. We use Codespaces for our own dev environments at GitHub so any outages you experience we do as well. I cannot speak to this product area as far as work goes and don't think this is the greatest venue to go back and forth about it, in any case.

As said, this is a way to get a sense of how this particular tool and cloud dev environments as a general concept might benefit the core contribution case. devcontainers as an open spec should mean that this can lay the groundwork for generally being usable across different options based on what works best for the contributor, which should always be our goal - to make it easier for folks to contribute given their differing needs and constraints. A Wasm option would also be great! Let's just not let ourselves get stuck in attempting to be perfect from the start, that's already happened to this effort a couple times.

[helen]

Committed in https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/55303