Quickstart tutorials

The recommended cloud-based development environment is Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces that provides a cloud-based development environment that is fully integrated into Red Hat OpenShift. If you do not have access to an OpenShift cluster, you can try Z Open Editor for free by signing up for a 30-day trial of the Red Hat Developer Sandbox. See, the full tutorial for signing up and using Z Open Editor here.

Note: GitHub Codespaces is a paid-for service, but the first usage hours are free.

Z Open Editor can also be used with all of its capabilities in Microsoft's GitHub Codespaces. For a quickstart, try it by using this link that loads the Z Open Editor sample repository. When the workspace starts up, it automatically loads the Z Open Editor VS Code extension and applies several configuration options based on a so-called devcontainer specification.

To learn more about what you can do with Z Open Editor in Codespaces, go to Using Z Open Editor on GitHub Codespaces in this documentation section.

Note: Gitpod is a paid-for service, but the first usage hours are free.

Gitpod is a cloud-based IDE offering by the Gitpod company that can also utilize VS Code as the browser-based editor and integrate with all the major Git service providers such as GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket. After you sign in with an account from either of these Git services, you can easily start a workspace with Z Open Editor. See, Gitpod

To try it out with the code samples repository, use this link. Gitpod will present a New Workspace screen for the workspace to be created filled in with the values provided by the URL. After you confirm these settings with the Continue button the workspace starts up.

The first startup might take a few minutes that shows you a Build Image screen as Gitpod has to pull the sample docker image from "quay.io/wazi/gitpod:latest" to its server to use it for the workspace. This custom image contains Zowe CLI with the RSE API plugin as well as the Ansible® CLI with the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z®. You can find the dockerfile used for this here. You can use it as a starting point for your own projects. The other file to review in the same repository is the "gitpod.yml" file that contains configuration options for the workspace. See the Gitpod documentation with all the details.

After the editor is up, you can see that VS Code extensions is installed automatically followed by a prompt from Zowe Explorer to reload the editor to finalize its setup. After you click "Reload Window", Z Open Editor shows its Welcome page and you are ready to open the sample programs provided with the repository. When you open the Terminal, you can test that Zowe CLI, Ansible and Java™ 17 are available as well.

To try it out with the code samples repository, use this link. The workspace starts up and loads a custom image that contains Zowe CLI and Ansible CLI. After the editor is up, click F1 and select the command View: Focus Activity Bar to bring in the sidebar that enables you to find the sample programs. Z Open Editor is automatically installed for this workspace, you can just open a program and start to edit. Note that this is a paid-for service, but the first hours are free.

Z Open Editor can be used as a pure web extension with limited capabilities when using Visual Studio Code in a browser, such as on vscode.dev or github.dev.

Go to the link and confirm in the dialog to install the recommended extensions by clicking Install. No language server capabilities are available, but provides syntax highlighting for all the supported languages.