Provide nightly builds for testing

[jawnsy]

Background

We currently provide a variety of release builds that users can install with install.sh, as well as a package published to npm so that users can install from source code. These are updated when we create a release, which means that users may have to wait until the next release to see whether a bug fix addressed their issue.

Reducing the cycle time for feedback means that we can iterate more rapidly on code-server, and one way to achieve that is to publish nightly builds, so that users can see whether we have resolved their issues.

Proposal

• Publish a code-server-next or code-server-latest package that users can install via npm
• Publish nightly builds of our usual build artifacts, like a Debian/Ubuntu package, etc (we may want to limit these to the last 30 or 90 days to reduce storage costs)

[jsjoeio]

Yes! We need this yesterday. cc @bpmct @code-asher since I've chatted with y'all about this before.

[jsjoeio]

Homebrew

One of the pieces of this puzzle is supporting nightlies on Homebrew. While homebrew/core doesn't support beta/development versions, we can maintain our own tap (grain-lang does this here).

UX

As a user, not a lot would change.

• to install code-server's stable release, brew install code-server
• to install the nightly release, brew tap cdr/code-server-nightly (example)

Notes

the forumla can get complex if you need to build from source

Formula are the "build from source" option, and Cask are the "prepackaged" option

Yeah, you can see that in our url config, we derive the github tag and then download our tool

Resources

• https://docs.brew.sh/Versions#acceptable-versioned-formulae
• https://github.com/grain-lang/homebrew-tap
• Support for beta/nightly version? Homebrew/discussions#2217

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no activity occurs in the next 5 days.

[jsjoeio]

Not stale