‫If you haven't figured out by ‫now, I love Visual Studio Code.
‫In fact, if you look at some of my ‫original videos from this course,
‫back when I first created it, then ‫there's a few videos still around from
‫that time that I was using VIM a lot.
‫And I've been a VIM user ‫for probably decades now.
‫And that's.
‫As a sysadmin, that was really my thing.
‫I would always have to run stuff on ‫servers and edit files on servers.
‫So I was always using them ‫and I just got used to that.
‫It wasn't really until VS Code all the ‫other editors I've tried Atom and all
‫of the other paid editors and things ‫over the years, never really got stuck
‫with any of 'em until VS Code showed up.
‫So I'm convinced now that for DevOps ‫and especially for this course, when
‫you're doing Kubernetes and Docker ‫files and you're editing Compose
‫YAML, and all the things you'll learn ‫about in this course, that the easiest
‫way to do that is in Visual Studio ‫Code for a lot of reasons, most of
‫which are around syntax highlighting, ‫helping you see errors inside of those
‫files when you're typing 'em out.
‫Because it'll look and see if ‫the commands are correct or the
‫things you're doing are correct.
‫And it's just a good buddy ‫while you're learning as well as
‫just doing your day to day job.
‫So let's jump into it.
‫I'm not gonna talk a lot about the ‫internals or how to really use it.
‫I just wanna make sure that if ‫you're new to Visual Studio Code,
‫that you have a few of the basics ‫that you need to get started.
‫And then the extensions that will ‫really help you in this course.
‫Now you can just download it ‫from their website, right?
‫That's code.visualstudio.com.
‫You can go there and download ‫it for your local OS.
‫If you're on windows, you can ‫use the store to download it.
‫If you prefer the window store method.
‫You can even run it in a web browser ‫over at VS Code dot dev, which will just
‫run the exact same app in a browser tab.
‫If you're a GitHub fan and you maybe ‫are going to use it with repositories
‫on GitHub like this course, you ‫could just use it on GitHub.
‫You can type https://github.dev.
‫It'll give you some information ‫about how to use it inside of
‫repositories, right inside your ‫browser with the rest of GitHub.
‫Once you've got it running regardless of ‫how you want to run it, click the little
‫widget down there and you can log in.
‫No logging in is key here because ‫it'll sync all your settings so
‫that you don't have to worry about ‫backing them up because over time
‫you're really gonna end up with your ‫own custom configuration of VS Code.
‫So why not save those settings ‫securely somewhere since you
‫can get to 'em from any machine?
‫So turn on sync and you ‫should be good to go there.
‫Then you'll want to open ‫up this course repository.
‫And once you do this little popup will ‫show up and this is a feature of VS Code.
‫So I can put in my repository inside ‫the .vscode directory over here, I
‫can put in an extensions, JSON file ‫that recommends extensions for you to
‫use this repository, which is great ‫for courses, because now you can just
‫click the install button there, or you ‫can click the show recommendations.
‫If you wanna see what it's gonna install.
‫Now, the first extension I'm ‫gonna recommend might be obvious,
‫which is the Docker extension.
‫And what's nice about VS Code is ‫that even if you didn't install
‫my recommended extensions, that it ‫would recommend what it sees on your
‫operating system there it'll recommend.
‫So when you open up a Dockerfile, ‫it'll say hey, would you like to
‫install the Docker extension or if ‫it sees the Docker binary on your
‫machine, it will even say that.
‫So it will help you along your way.
‫If you have Terraform files or Terraform ‫installed, it might recommend Terraform,
‫same for Python or development languages.
‫It's pretty quick about that.
‫So just don't sweat, installing all the ‫extensions up front, if you don't want to.
‫But let me just tell you about ‫this one, the Docker extension,
‫in addition to helping you write ‫the Docker files and Compose files
‫that you will write throughout this ‫course, which when this course was
‫first created, we didn't have that.
‫And it was a little bit harder.
‫You had to go from memory and you ‫had to spend a lot of time on the
‫Docker documentation, but now we ‫have these extensions in VS Code
‫that will help you see mistakes.
‫Before you try to run the commands.
‫It'll help advise you on that ‫as well as it can control Docker
‫from inside VS Code itself.
‫If you'd like to know more about those ‫features, just check out this extension
‫readme page for each one of them.
‫The same goes for the ‫official Kubernetes extension.
‫You'll notice that both of ‫these extensions are supported
‫and written by Microsoft.
‫So you'll see the nice little ‫Microsoft logo with the blue
‫checkbox there, indicating that ‫it is a legit safe extension from
‫the makers of VS Code Microsoft.
‫And just like the Docker extension.
‫I use a fraction of the features ‫here, but I find it very useful.
‫It includes snippets and examples for ‫some of the YAML and configuration
‫files you'll make later in this course.
‫So there's just really ‫no reason not to have it.
‫The next set of extensions that ‫I highly recommend, especially
‫if you think you will use remote ‫servers at all during this course.
‫And we will have some of the lectures ‫talk about remote servers and
‫have you set them up if you can.
‫But when you wanna run remote servers, ‫the remote development extensions from
‫Microsoft are also extremely handy.
‫These are one of the few extensions ‫that I use almost weekly.
‫If there's ever a need for me to have a ‫remote server, usually just for testing
‫something or trying something out or ‫building another lecture in my course,
‫I'm often using these remote extensions ‫and essentially there's the main remote
‫development extension right here.
‫And it will install at least three others.
‫It's sort of a meta extension.
‫It'll install the remote containers.
‫The remote SSH and then the remote ‫WSL that it talks about in this
‫main remote development extension.
‫So if you're on windows and using ‫WSL, like I recommend, then this
‫will automatically say, Hey, would ‫you like to enable the WSL feature?
‫What this allows you to do in WSL?
‫Because WSL is a Linux VM running ‫inside windows is it allows you to
‫run VS Code on your windows machine ‫and it can see the files natively
‫inside of your WSL Linux machine.
‫The same is true for the remote SSH, ‫anything remote a server over the
‫internet that you have SSH to, it will ‫treat it almost like you're developing
‫on your local system with a local ‫Linux shell, but you're really using
‫a server over the internet and your ‫code would be stored on that server.
‫And it's running all the ‫commands on that server.
‫So it's really slick.
‫It also allows me to do things like ‫run VS Code in a browser on an iPad.
‫And finally, it will also install the ‫container version of remote, where it'll
‫allow you to run your app code or any ‫of the code you wanna mess with inside
‫a container anywhere, Docker is running.
‫And once you have this installed, ‫you'll see a little box down here on
‫the very bottom left with a couple ‫of greater than less than arrows.
‫And if you were to click that, it's gonna ‫give you the dropdown menu for connecting
‫to the remote host or doing any of the ‫other things the remote features can do.
‫And this one's a bonus.
‫Technically, you don't need this at all ‫for this course, but if you happen to
‫be lucky enough to work in a team, or ‫maybe you're taking this course with
‫someone else, that's also learning Docker ‫or Kubernetes, and you'd like to pair
‫at all on this course or in you're in ‫a team that you wanna do code pairing,
‫or you might need to do code pairing, ‫or just simply show off your code to
‫someone else live, get the live share ‫official extension from Microsoft.
‫There's a lot of ones that have ‫similar names, but you wanna get the
‫live, share one from Microsoft because ‫this one uses a secure tunnel up to
‫Microsoft cloud servers to allow you to ‫mutually authenticate with someone else.
‫And then you essentially can just ‫share your repository through VS Code.
‫And you can both edit on the files like ‫you were sitting on the same machine.
‫You can actually see where each person ‫is writing like a Google doc and you
‫can move around the files and then tell ‫everyone else to come look at your file.
‫It's actually super neat.
‫It makes for great demos, especially like ‫if you're live streaming or making YouTube
‫videos like I do, it's pretty slick.
‫So I recommend trying that out ‫next time you need to share
‫some of your code with a friend.
‫And that's it.
‫You've got your Docker, ‫you've got your VS Code.
‫You've got the repository.
‫Let's get into talking about ‫the features of Docker.
‫Coming up next, running ‫and managing containers.