{"id":3395,"date":"2021-09-21T07:00:54","date_gmt":"2021-09-21T14:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/?p=3395"},"modified":"2021-09-21T22:35:35","modified_gmt":"2021-09-22T05:35:35","slug":"linux-emulator-and-vs-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/linux-emulator-and-vs-code\/","title":{"rendered":"Enhance local development experience using the Azure Cosmos DB Linux emulator and VS Code"},"content":{"rendered":"

This blog post provides a quick overview and demo of how you can use the\u00a0Azure Cosmos DB Linux Emulator on Docker<\/a>\u00a0(in preview at the time of writing) along with\u00a0Visual Studio Code<\/a>\u00a0in order to enhance your local development experience.<\/p>\n

Since the Azure Cosmos DB Linux Emulator is readily available as a Docker image (simply\u00a0docker pull mcr.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/linux\/azure-cosmos-emulator<\/code>), it’s easy to incorporate it within your existing setup. For instance, it could be in a docker-compose<\/code> file as a part of a larger stack (here is an\u00a0example of how to use it with Apache Kafka<\/a>). However, complementing it with the Visual Studio Code Remote – Containers<\/a> extension, gives you the ability to leverage a Docker container as a full-fledged development environment.<\/p>\n

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Say you want to build an app with\u00a0Azure Cosmos DB Core (SQL) API<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Java SDK<\/a>, and you have VS Code and Docker (optionally Docker Compose) available. Just create a JSON configuration file (called devcontainer.json<\/code>) to define your stack. You can then spin up an environment on-demand with just a few clicks – this will constitute one or more Docker containers along with the entire operating system, programming language runtime (Java in this case), toolset, etc. which you originally specified in devcontainer.json<\/code>.<\/p>\n

Some of the obvious benefits of using the emulator include: it’s cost-effective (free!), convenient for scenarios when your app has other components (e.g. messaging systems) and great for iterative development\/prototyping\/demos since setting up and tearing down the environment is easy, consistent and error-free (in most cases!)<\/p>\n

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How to use the Azure Cosmos DB Linux emulator with VS Code<\/h3>\n

Use the instructions in this GitHub repo<\/a> to get started quickly. It is based on the original sample code repo for Azure Cosmos DB Java SDK for SQL API<\/a>\u00a0with\u00a0added files<\/a> to enable “Visual Studio Code Remote – Containers” experience.<\/p>\n

You can also follow along with the video that shows all of this in action:<\/p>\n