Eclipse Che 7 has been announced few days ago, if you have not yet tried it, it’s time to experiment with all the new exciting capabilities!

This guide will drive you through different steps and allow you to experiment Che 7. To follow this guide, you’ll not need to install Che on your machine or your K8S cluster, we’ll just be using a free online instance of Eclipse Che that is running at https://che.openshift.io

It’s a free-to-use instance that is powered by latest Eclipse Che 7 version and providing 3GB of memory for a single workspace. It requires a Red Hat Developer account but you can log-in with different third parties accounts like github, facebook, google, twitter, etc.

Pre-requisities

  • After creating a new account or simply log-in, you’re redirected to the dashboard page of Eclipse Che

Discovering Che Workspaces

Eclipse Che is using containers under the hood. It means all runtimes used in workspaces can be customized by some docker images: for example java runtime, nodejs runtime, etc. are provided on top of docker images.

But as it may be difficult to start by writing or providing first a Docker image, there are default ready-to-use workspace templates.

These ready-to-use workspaces are provided on top of community Docker images and are great to start to work on a given technology.

Create a workspace

Let’s create a simple go application

  • On the dashboard, click “Create Workspace”
  • In the select stack section, click on go
  • Check that in projects section, example is selected

  • After clicking on create & open button we’re redirected to the IDE

Note: we use ephemeral mode flag as we don’t care about persisting changes for demos and want the fastest I/O storage.

Discover the new IDE!

In the IDE, there are several useful areas/panels.

Clicking on the top left file icon will display all the files of the current workspace.

Command palette

Press F1 key or click on the command palette link in the Welcome Panel. Enter some keyword to filter out commands. Formatting can be done easily with a specific command invoked from command palette. Keyboard shortcuts are displayed on the right of the command. No need to bring command palette and select a command if you already know its shortcut.

Workspace panel

The workspace panel is a quick view allowing to interact with the workspace like launching pre-defined commands for this workspace or opening terminals.

There are two kind of containers:
 — Plugin’s runtime containers: containers provided by plug-ins. It’s the execution runtime used by these plugins

— User runtime container: We may not have it at all or more than one. It’s used to run some commands you would like. All these commands can be found by using the command palette and using Run Task

By clicking on a command name (single click, no double-click), like run outyet it will invoke this command in the go-cli container. You may open a terminal as well from this view by clicking on New terminal link. Terminals can be opened on any containers.

Status bar

Blue bar means that IDE is remotely connected to the workspace server. In case of connection failures, the bar will turn into orange and there is a text saying offline. Information like git information orephemeral mode are also displayed.

Language tooling

Ready-to-go workspaces are already providing the tooling for the selected language so no need to install plug-ins after in order to work on a project.

From the view/Plugins panel we can see that we already have go plug-in installed.

by opening file src/github.com/golang/example/outyet/main.go there is already syntax highlighting in the go file.

Debugging is also easy. Just create a new launch configuration for go.

Debugging the application

After opening the debugger panel by going into the menu: View --> Debug

Then, in the Debugger panel, click on the dropdown of the configurations and click on Add Configuration...

note: it’s also possible to add configurations by clicking in menuDebug/Add Configuration...

Using the code completion, select the Go: Launch file entry and let the default.

Now, just hit some breakpoints in the code by clicking on the space before the line number

And launch the debug configuration (default name will Launch File )

All options like step-in, step-out, resume, etc. are available in the debugger.

Inline operations are also available in the editor when you edit test files.

Opening file src/github.com/golang/example/outyet/main_test.go file and then going on test functions will display run/debug options.

Now, you’re ready to experiment Eclipse Che on your own!

Get Involved!

Quick Start with Eclipse Che.

Join the community:

  • Support: You can ask questions, report bugs, and request features using GitHub issues.
  • Public Chat: Join the public eclipse-che Mattermost channel to discuss with community and contributors.
  • Weekly Meetings: Join us in our Che community meeting every second monday.
  • Mailing list: che-dev@eclipse.org