We are starting our Platform Week focused on the most important aspect of a developer platform — developers. At the core of every announcement this week is developer experience. In other words, it doesn’t matter how groundbreaking the technology is if at the end of the day we’re not making your job as a developer easier.
Earlier today, we announced the general availability of a new Wrangler version, making it easier than ever to get started and develop with Workers. We’re also excited to announce that we’re partnering with StackBlitz. Together, we will bring the Wrangler experience closer to you – directly to your browser, with no dependencies required!
StackBlitz is a web-based code editor provided with a fresh and fast development environment on each page load. StackBlitz’s development environments are powered by WebContainers, the first WebAssembly-based operating system, which boots secure development environments entirely within your browser tab.
Introducing new Wrangler, running in your browser
One of the Wrangler improvements we announced today is the option to easily run Wrangler in any Node.js environment, including your browser which is now powered by WebContainers!
StackBlitz’s WebContainers are optimized for starting any project within seconds, including the installation of all dependencies. Whenever you’re ready to start a fresh development environment, you can refresh the browser tab running StackBlitz’s editor and have everything instantly ready to go.
Don’t just take our word for it, you can test this out yourself by opening up a sample project on https://workers.new/typescript.
Note: currently, only Chromium based browsers are supported.
You can think of WebContainers as an in-browser operating system: they include features like a file system, multi-process and multi-threading application support, and a virtualized TCP network stack with the use of ServiceWorkers.
Interested in learning more about WebContainers? Check out the introduction blog post or WebContainer working group GitHub repository.
Powering a better developer experience and documentation
We’re excited about all the possibilities that instant development environments running in the browser open us up to. For example, they enable us to embed or link full code projects directly from our documentation examples and tutorials without waiting for a remote server to spin up a container with your environment.
Try out the following templates and have a little sneak peek of the developer experience we are working together to enable, as running a new Workers application locally was never easier!
https://workers.new/router
https://workers.new/durable-objects
https://workers.new/typescript
What’s next
StackBlitz supports running Wrangler in a local mode today, and we are working together to enable features that require authentication to bring the full developer lifecycle inside your browser - including development on the edge, publishing, and debugging or tailing logs of your published Workers.
Share what you have built with us and stay tuned for more updates! Make sure to follow us on Twitter or join our Discord Developers Community server.