The workspace lifecycle
This article explains the stages in the life of a workspace, from creation to deletion. If you have read the Quickstart article and you now want to start using Boltic Workspaces for your own work, see the articles under Developing in a workspace.
About the lifecycle of a workspace
The lifecycle of a workspace begins when you create a workspace and ends when you delete it. You can disconnect and reconnect to an active workspace without affecting its running processes. You may stop and restart a workspace without losing changes that you have made to your project.
Creating a workspace
When you want to work on a project, you can choose to create a new workspace or open an existing workspace. You might want to create a new workspace from a branch of your repository each time you develop in Boltic Workspaces or keep a long-running workspace for a feature.
There are limits to the number of workspaces you can create, and the number of workspaces you can run at the same time. These limits vary based on a number of factors. If you reach the maximum number of workspaces and try to create another, a message is displayed telling you that you must remove an existing workspace before you can create a new one. Similarly, if you reach the maximum number of active workspaces and you try to start another, you are prompted to stop one of your active workspaces.
If you choose to create a new workspace each time you work on a project, you should regularly push your changes so that any new commits are pushed to the git repository. If you choose to use a long-running workspace for your project, you should pull from your repository's default branch each time you start working in your workspace so that your environment has the latest commits. This workflow is very similar to if you were working with a project on your local machine.
Saving changes in a workspace
When you connect to a workspace through the web, auto-save is enabled automatically for the web editor and configured to save changes after a delay. When you connect to a workspace through Visual Studio Code running on your desktop, you must enable auto-save. For more information, see Save/Auto Save in the Visual Studio Code documentation.
Your work will be saved on a virtual machine in the cloud. You can close and stop a workspace and return to the saved work later. If you have unsaved changes, your editor will prompt you to save them before exiting. However, if your workspace is deleted, then your work will be deleted too. To persist your work, you will need to commit your changes and push them to your remote repository.
Timeouts for Boltic Workspaces
If you leave your workspace running without interaction, or if you exit your workspace without explicitly stopping it, the workspace will timeout after a period of inactivity and stop running. By default, a workspace will timeout after 30 minutes of inactivity, this timeout cannot currently be changed. For more information about stopping a workspace, see Stopping a workspace.
When a workspace times out, your data is preserved from the last time your changes were saved. For more information, see "Saving changes in a workspace."
Stopping a workspace
You can stop a workspace at any time. When you stop a workspace, any running processes are stopped. Any saved changes in your workspace will still be available when you next start it. The terminal history is preserved, but the visible contents of the terminal window are not preserved between workspace sessions.
If you do not explicitly stop a workspace, it will continue to run until it times out from inactivity. Closing a workspace does not stop the workspace. For example, if you're using a workspace in the VS Code web client and you close the browser tab, the workspace remains running on the remote machine. For information about timeouts, see Timeouts for Boltic Workspaces.
Only running workspaces incur CPU charges. A stopped workspace incurs only storage costs.
You may want to stop and restart a workspace to apply changes to it. For example, if you change the machine type used for your workspace, you will need to stop and restart it for the change to take effect. You can also stop your workspace and choose to restart or delete it if you encounter an error or something unexpected.
Deleting a workspace
You can create a workspace for a particular task and then safely delete the workspace after you push your changes to a remote branch.
If you try to delete a workspace with unpushed git commits, your editor will notify you that you have changes that have not been pushed to a remote branch. You can push any desired changes and then delete your workspace, or continue to delete your workspace and any uncommitted changes. Your commits will only be available to restore if they have been pushed to a remote branch. Commits to local branches are not restored.
Workspaces that have been stopped and remain inactive for a specified period of time will be deleted automatically. By default, inactive workspaces are deleted after 30 days, this setting cannot currently be changed
If you create a workspace, it will continue to accrue storage charges until it is deleted, irrespective of whether it is active or stopped. Deleting a workspace does not reduce the current billable amount for Boltic Workspaces, which accumulates during each monthly billing cycle.
Losing the connection while using Boltic Workspaces
Boltic Workspaces is a cloud-based development environment and requires an internet connection. If you lose connection to the internet while working in a workspace, you will not be able to access your workspace. However, any uncommitted changes will be saved. When you have access to an internet connection again, you can connect to your workspace in the exact same state that it was left in. If you have an unstable internet connection, you should commit and push your changes often.