Exposing Ports

If you want to access services running in your workspace, e.g. a development HTTP server on port 8080, you need to expose that port first. Gitpod has two means of doing that:

1. On-the-fly: when you start a process which listens on a port in your workspace, Gitpod will ask you if you want to expose that port to the internet.
2. In your configuration: if you already know that you want a particular port exposed, you can configure it in the .gitpod.yml file and skip the extra click later on. For example:

ports:
  - port: 8080

Ports are mapped to their own URLs. In a workspace you can get the URL mapped to a port using gp url <port>. At the moment you can only expose HTTP servers.

Port Ranges

You can configure entire ranges and tell Gitpod how it should behave when a service in such a range is opened.

For instance, the following configs will stop notifying the user when a service opens on a port between 3000 and 8999:

ports:
  - port: 3000-8999
    onOpen: ignore

Configure the Opening Behavior

When a newly started service gets detected, you usually get a notification telling you about it. If it is not yet exposed, because it is not listed in the .gitpod.yml, the notification will allow you to expose the port. If it is already exposed, either through the .gitpod.yml or by manually exposing it, the notification asks whether and how to open it.

To change this behavior you can provide the property onOpen. It has four possible values:

• notify (default) - Show the notification.
• open-preview - Open in the preview on the right.
• open-browser - Open in a browser tab.
• ignore - Don’t do anything.

Any changes to the .gitpod.yml will have effect immediately.

Configure port visibility

By default, all ports are in public visibiltiy state.

To change this behavior you can provide the property visibility. It has two possible values:

• public (default) - Allows everyone with the port URL to access the port.
• private - Only allow users with workspace access to access the port.