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What is Charcoal?

A lightweight orchestrator for local and remote development environments. Built with Dev Container. It bridges the gap between local Docker-based workflows and cloud-scale development environments.

The platform is composed of three components:

charcoal-cli

The command-line tool for provisioning and managing dev containers. Clone a repo, launch a browser-based VS Code, and stop environments — all from your terminal.

charcoal up --ide https://github.com/octocat/hello-world.git

Get started with the CLI →

  1. Clones the repository into ~/.charcoal-ws/
  2. Detects or generates a devcontainer.json
  3. Builds and starts the container with devcontainer up
  4. Launches either an interactive shell or a web-based VS Code (OpenVSCode Server)

Charcoal Platform

A web-based dashboard for managing development environments visually — coming soon.

Learn more about the Platform →

API Reference

Programmatic access to charcoal's orchestration layer for CI/CD and custom tooling — coming soon.

Learn more about the API →

Which component should I use?

You want to... Use
Provision environments from the terminal CLI
Manage workspaces with a graphical dashboard Platform (coming soon)
Integrate with CI/CD or bPlatformld custom tooling API (coming soon)