JetBrains CodeCanvas 2025.1 Help

About

JetBrains CodeCanvas is a solution that lets companies transition software development from individual user machines to remove development environments. What CodeCanvas does is often called remote development orchestration  – configuring, running, and managing container environments with IDE backends.

Quick overview

Start here

Install

New installation

If you're a system administrator who wants to install CodeCanvas in your company, refer to the installation guide.

Setup

Preliminary setup

If you have a fresh CodeCanvas installation, you need to perform some preliminary setup steps before your company can start using CodeCanvas. Refer to the quick start guide for system administrators.

Configure

Configure CodeCanvas for your project

If you're an administrator who wants to configure dev environments for your Git repository, refer to the quick start guide for namespace administrators.

Start coding

Start developing

If you're a developer who wants to start working with code in a remote dev environment, refer to the quick start guide for users.

How it works

CodeCanvas is an on-premises solution that runs in a Kubernetes cluster. Currently, we support clusters hosted in Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), Azure AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), and Google GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). CodeCanvas manages remote development environments (dev environments) that run in containers in the same or a different Kubernetes cluster. A dev environment runs an IDE backend and a set of tools required for development.

For more details, refer to Architecture.

For developers, using CodeCanvas feels like working with their usual IDEs on their local machines. To start working, they connect to a dev environment via a client application (e.g., JetBrains Gateway in the case of IntelliJ-based IDEs).

Dev environments basic architecture
19 May 2025