Follow the steps in this guide to get your first Coder development environmentrunning in under 10 minutes. This guide covers the essential concepts and walksyou through creating your first workspace and running VS Code from it. You canalso get Claude Code up and running in the background!

What You'll Build

In this quickstart, you'll:

• ✅ Install Coder server
• ✅ Create atemplate (blueprint for dev environments)
• ✅ Launch aworkspace (your actual dev environment)
• ✅ Connect from your favorite IDE
• ✅ Optionally setup atask running Claude Code

Understanding Coder: 30-Second Overview

Before diving in, here are the core concepts that power Coder explained througha cooking analogy:

Putting it Together: Coder separates whodefines environments from whouses them. Admins create and manage Templates, the recipes, while developers use those Templates to launch Workspaces, the meals. Inside those Workspaces, developers can also run Tasks, the smart kitchen appliance, to help speed up day-to-day work.

Prerequisites

• A machine with 2+ CPU cores and 4GB+ RAM
• 10 minutes of your time

Step 1: Install Docker and Setup Permissions

Step 2: Install & Start Coder

Install thecoder CLI to get started:

Coder will attempt to open the setup page in your browser. If it doesn't openautomatically, go tohttp://localhost:3000.

• If you get a browser warning similar toSecure Site Not Available, you canignore the warning and continue to the setup page.

If your Coder server is on a network or cloud device, or you are having troubleviewing the page, locate the web UI URL in Coder logs in your terminal. It lookslikehttps://<CUSTOM-STRING>.<TUNNEL>.try.coder.app. It's one of the firstlines of output, so you might have to scroll up to find it.

Step 3: Initial Setup

1. Create your admin account:

   • Username:yourname (lowercase, no spaces)
   • Email:[email protected]
   • Password: Choose a strong password

   You can also choose toContinue with GitHub instead of creating an adminaccount. The first user that signs in is automatically granted adminpermissions.

   

Step 4: Create your First Template and Workspace

Templates define what's in your development environment. Let's start simple:

1. Click"Templates" →"New Template"

2. Choose a starter template:

   Starter	Best For	Includes
   Docker Containers (Recommended)	Getting started quickly, local development, prototyping	Ubuntu container with common dev tools, Docker runtime
   Kubernetes (Deployment)	Cloud-native teams, scalable workspaces	Pod-based workspaces, Kubernetes orchestration
   AWS EC2 (Linux)	Teams needing full VMs, AWS-native infrastructure	Full EC2 instances with AWS integration

3. Click"Use template" onDocker Containers. Note: running this template requires Docker to be running in the background, so make sure Docker is running!

4. Name your template:

   • Name:quickstart
   • Display name:quickstart doc template
   • Description:Provision Docker containers as Coder workspaces

5. Click"Save"

   

What just happened? You defined a template — a reusable blueprint for devenvironments — in your Coder deployment. It's now stored in your organization'stemplate list, where you and any teammates in the same org can create workspacesfrom it. Let's launch one.

Step 5: Launch your Workspace

1. After the template is ready, selectCreate Workspace.

2. Give the workspace a name and selectCreate Workspace.

3. Coder starts your new workspace:

   
   Workspaceis running

Step 6: Connect your IDE

SelectVS Code Desktop to install the Coder extension and connect to yourCoder workspace.

After VS Code loads the remote environment, you can selectOpen Folder toexplore directories in the Docker container or work on something new.

To clone an existing repository:

1. SelectClone Repository and enter the repository URL.

   For example, to clone the Coder repo, enterhttps://github.com/coder/coder.git.

   Learn more about how to find the repository URL in theGitHub documentation.

2. Choose the folder to which VS Code should clone the repo. It will be in itsown directory within this folder.

   Note that you cannot create a new parent directory in this step.

3. After VS Code completes the clone, selectOpen to open the directory.

4. You are now using VS Code in your Coder environment!

Success! You're Coding in Coder

You now have:

• Coder server running locally
• A template defining your environment
• A workspace running that environment
• IDE access to code remotely

What's Next?

Now that you have your own workspace running, you can start exploring moreadvanced capabilities that Coder offers.

• Learn more about running Coder Tasks and our recommended Best Practices

• Read about managing Workspaces for your team

• Read about implementing monitoring tools for your Coder Deployment

Get Coder Tasks Running

Coder Tasks is an interface that allows you to run and manage coding agents likeClaude Code within a given Workspace. Tasks become available when the Template for a Workspace has thecoder_ai_task resource andcoder_parameter namedAI Prompt defined in its source code.In other words, any existing template can become a Task template by adding in thatresource and parameter.

Coder maintains theTasks on Docker template which has Anthropic's Claude Code agent built in with a sample application. Let's try using this template by pulling it from Coder's Registry of public templates, and pushing it to your local server:

1. In the upper right hand corner, clickUse this template

2. Open a terminal on your machine

3. Ensure your CLI is authenticated with your Coder deployment bylogging in

4. Create anAPI Key with Anthropic

5. Head to theTasks on Docker template

6. Clone the Coder Registry repo to your local machine

   git clone https://github.com/coder/registry.git

7. Switch to the template directory

   cd registry/registry/coder-labs/templates/tasks-docker

8. Push the template to your Coder deployment. Note: this command differs from the registry since we're defining the Anthropic API Key as an environment variable

   coder template push tasks-docker -d . --variable anthropic_api_key="your-api-key"

9. Create the new Workspace

   1. In your Coder Deployment, clickWorkspaces in the upper left hand corner
   2. ClickNew workspace and choosetasks-docker
   3. Fill in the Workspace name. Add in an AI Prompt for Claude Code like "Make the background yellow". ClickCreate workspace

10. See Tasks in action

    1. Once your workspace is running, clickView tasks with your workspace. This will bring you to the Tasks view where you can see Claude Code (left panel), preview the sample application, and interact with the code in code-server. You might need to wait for Claude Code to finish changing the background color of the application.
    2. Navigate to theTasks tab in the upper left hand corner
    3. Try typing in a new request to Claude Code: "make the background red"
    4. Let's exit out of this specific Task view, so we can see all the running tasks
    5. You can start a new task by prompting in the "Prompt your AI agent to start a task" box. You can select which template to run this from, so tasks-docker here, and that will spin up a new Workspace
    

Congratulation! You now have a Coder Task running. This demo has shown you how to spin up a task, and prompt Claude Code to change parts of your application. Learn more specifics about Coder Taskshere.

Troubleshooting

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon

Error: Error pinging Docker server: Cannot connect to the Docker daemon atunix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?

1. Install Docker for your system:

   curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh

2. Set up the Docker daemon in rootless mode for your user to run Docker as anon-privileged user:

   dockerd-rootless-setuptool.sh install

   Depending on your system's dependencies, you might need to run other commandsbefore you retry this step. Read the output of this command for furtherinstructions.

3. Assign your user to the Docker group:

   sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

4. Confirm that the user has been added:

   $ groupsdocker sudo users

   • Ubuntu users might not see the group membership update. In that case, runthe following command or reboot the machine:

     newgrp docker

Can't start Coder server: Address already in use

1. Stop the process:

   sudo systemctl stop coder

2. Start Coder:

   coder server