Epic(experiment): Create new projects and enable prebuilds from within the IDE

[jankeromnes]

It would be great if the IDE allowed users to enable Prebuilds for their repository via a simple quick action.

I guess the IDE would need to be aware of:

• Whether Prebuilds are already enabled or not for the current repository (and whether there is already a Gitpod Project associated to it)
• Whether the current user is authorized to enable prebuilds (which implies the creation of a Gitpod Project, and the installation of the GitHub App or GitLab/Bitbucket Webhook)
• Whether there is a .gitpod.yml with an init task, or if one needs to be created first

[svenefftinge]

Enabling prebuild would imply creating a Gitpod project as well.

[jldec]

Enabling prebuild would imply creating a Gitpod project as well.

aah 💡

[jldec]

This feels like a joint effort, interfacing from inside the IDE to the Gitpod server/api to create a project with a repo which includes .gitpod.yml configuration.

[loujaybee]

Thanks for raising this issue @jankeromnes ! 🙏

I think this makes sense. Since prebuilds are a sort-of optimization of an existing configuration (e.g. init), without an existing configuration, a prebuild does appear (from a user perspective at least) to bring little value. I think it's important that users know about prebuilds (but from the usability tests I ran, it seems our marketing copy does a good job of letting users know that this feature exists 😆 ). So I think it makes sense to defer until the user has understood what gitpod is, and what the YAML file / configuration is before we ask them to set up a prebuild.

Important: I don't think that necessarily the prebuild must be configured from within the IDE.

I think we should also answer this question:

"Where is the best / most convenient place/way for a user to set up their YAML / configuration file? The dashboard or the IDE? And do we want to support both of those flows? Which should we push users towards as a priority, and when?"

Regarding:

Whether there is a .gitpod.yml with an init task, or if one needs to be created first

I would add to this. There are additional "tells" that a user might want to implement a prebuild, such as long times on running a command ("long" in this context is subjective, and would need to be defined). We could then consider prompting a user as to whether there are aspects of their configured commands that they could extract into a prebuild. This could be an optional prompt, that can be "dismissed". This experience would be much like slack bot prodding you to take actions like: "Hey, we see that you've not messaged in X channels in a while, do you want to leave those channels?". This prompt could then be directly within the IDE experience, or via other bumpers, such as suggestions from within the dashboard.

Configuring a prebuild doesn't have to be an interrupting action, I think it could be something we encourage users to do later in their journey when using Gitpod, and almost definitely after they have created (or use) at least one YAML.

e.g. "Hey, we noticed that X project takes a long time to build, have you considered [setting up a prebuild]?"

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Example "notification" on the team page

Example notification on the project page:

[stale]

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