Follow these simple steps to fire up a Linux host – with full control over it – and anything you need, just in a couple commands!
If interested in understanding what's happening under the hood: in a few words, a containerized dev environment is instantiated in both cases (here below – locally, with Docker or in the cloud, with GitHub). There, every tool we need to develop (an IDE and the CLI) is accessible from the browser itself.
What we miss is just a GUI to render pygame graphics.
To overcome this issue, thanks to the pygbag module, fortunately we can access the game as a webapp on a browser-based GUI. More info on this package at the following links:
This is the quickest way to spin up a lightweight dev environment (in the cloud), without having to install anything on your personal computer, althougth sacrifying to some extent full access to resources and the overall control, over this environment.
Once logged-in on GitHub, navigate to the repo andreagalle/snake-autoplay and click on the Use this template > Open in a codespace button
This will open a browser-based IDE (essentially vscode) in a new tab. As you instantiate this particular codespace, from the integrated CLI launch the setup script, after having sourced the hidden .env file:
source .env
setup
to install (first time only) all the dependecies we need, basically pygame and a custom version of pygbag modules.
Then, launch the deploy script:
deploy
this basically use pygbag module passing the GitHub ${CODESPACE_NAME} environment variable, to deploy the game on that domain name (randomly choosed by GitHub itself), under the default port 8000.
This domain name must coincide with the string highlighted in the above URL thus, launching the deploy script would be the same as running the following command, for instance:
pygbag --gh_codespace "andreagalle-animated-space-zebra" main.py
passing the "andreagalle-animated-space-zebra" codespace name itself, randomly assigned by GitHub itself. That's important to remember, just in case the ${CODESPACE_NAME} environment variable won't work anymore in the future!
( "An animated space zebra in the style of vector artwork." prompted to DALL·E 2 - OpenAI on the 16th March 2023.)
Now click on the Ready to start! button, navigate the menu to choose the game mode and that's it!
N.B. always remember to turn off the codespace we just instantiated, not to waste useful resources (i.e. core hours used). Thus click on the GitHub Codespace tab at the Top Navigation Bar of the repo
then, search for the (randomly generated) name of the running codespace and stop it.
Read this guide as a Slideshow.
This is the most effective solution to get a fully fledged dev environment (locally): with minimal installation requirements (just Docker) and full controll over the available resources, as well as over the whole environment!
Once installed Docker on you personal computer (check out the right installation package given the OS)
open any CLI, and run the following command
docker run --name snake-autoplay -d -p 8020-8040:8020-8040 alnoda/python-workspace
this will run a Docker container, in detached mode, with the promised dev environment accessible from the browser.
After the alnoda/python-workspace Docker image has been pulled (the very first time) and the Docker container is up and running, go to localhost:8020
From there open the Terminal webapp (CLI) and there, clone the repo andreagalle/snake-autoplay
git clone https://github.com/andreagalle/snake-autoplay.git
Let's start installing all the necessary dependecies, starting from pygame module, the most important one!
pip install pygame
Then, let's install a custom version of the pygbag module:
git clone https://github.com/andreagalle/pygbag.git
cd pygbag
git checkout docker-workspace
pip install -e $PWD
Now go back to the root repo
cd ../snake-autoplay/
from there deploy the game, as a webapp, with the following command:
pygbag --docker_workspace --port 8030 main.py
go to localhost:8030 click on the Ready to start! button, navigate the menu to choose the game mode and that's it!