GitHub Codespaces Setup

If you are unable to build and run the assignment programs on your personal computer, you can consider using GitHub Codespaces to develop and run your assignments in the cloud.

Codespaces is a service offered by GitHub. There are many other companies offering cloud computing resources (some free, some paid), however, Codespaces is notable for its essentially non-existent setup effort.

Unfortunately, GitHub is not too interested in giving out free computing resources, and therefore Codespaces is billed based on usage. However, as a university student, you get GitHub Pro, and with that 180 core-hours and 20GB of storage on Codespaces, for free as part of the Student Developer Pack. You will need to verify your status as a student (e.g., with your Confirmation of Enrolment / BVI) to get access to the benefits.

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Using Codespaces

Once your student status is confirmed you can start using Codespaces for free (as you will likely not exceed the 180 core-hours in one month). To get started, go to the GitHub page of your private Lab repository (the one that you created from the public template repository) and click the green "Code" button. Now select the "Codespaces" tab and click the green "Create Codespace on main" button.

A new tab should open, giving you a web version of the VS Code interface. You can use this interface in the same way as VS Code running locally on your machine. That means you will need to install the needed extensions as described in the README.md file before starting to work on the assignments.

Make sure you regularly commit your work and push the changes to GitHub. Codespaces does not automatically synchronize with your repository (similarly as your local machine would not)

Once you have done the above-described setup, you can find this Codespace in the Codespaces Tab of your GitHub Account, so you do not need to set it up every time you want to work on it.