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In the last step, we opened a workspace. Opening workspaces clones our repo, sets up git, and then gives us an isolated workspace. However, the power of Gitpod comes when you automate your development environment by configuring a .gitpod.yml.

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Understanding tasks - command

The simplest first task to automate is the installation of packages. We do that by adding them as a command in a task definition. Add a .gitpod.yml at the root of your repository, add the following code, commit and re-open the workspace.
.gitpod.yml
tasks:
 - command: npm start

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Understanding tasks - multiple commands

Now let’s take that example, and add some more steps to install our packages, and start both our frontend and backend applications. Go ahead and update your .gitpod.yml stop your workspace and then start a new one.
.gitpod.yml
tasks:
    - name: run back-end
      openMode: split-left
      command: |
          npm install pg dotenv
          npm install
          npm start

    - name: run front-end
      openMode: split-right
      command: |
          cd client
          npm install
          echo "REACT_APP_API_URL=$(gp url 3001)" > .env
          npm start
Each task block is a new terminal in your development environment. You can see all running tasks by running gp tasks in a workspace. You’ll notice that we also use openMode in each task to specify how these terminals open in the workspace. Here’s how it should look:

split terminal example

Caption: VS Code split terminals

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Optimizing your .gitpod.yml

The above .gitpod.yml will run all of your tasks in the “foreground”, e.g. once the workspace has started. This is a great way to get started, however you might want to optimize your workspaces to open faster, which you can do by using Prebuilds. To use Prebuilds you need to:
  1. Modify your .gitpod.yml to specify which steps can be ran in advance.
  2. Enable Prebuilds in your Repository Settings.
Here’s a modified version of the above .gitpod.yml however, we’re going to run our npm install command in a prebuild.
.gitpod.yml
image: gitpod/workspace-postgres

tasks:
    - name: run back-end
      openMode: split-left
      init: npm install
      command: npm start

    - name: run front-end
      init: cd client && npm install
      command: |
          echo "REACT_APP_API_URL=$(gp url 3001)" > .env
          npm start
      openMode: split-right

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Next Steps

Configure ports →