Coder Templates Setup

Thank you very much for your reply. I’m a beginner when it comes to Coder, so I’ll try to summarize my thoughts.

My projects in Astro, Hugo, Golang, RStudio, and Rust are going to be developed in Coder in the future. I plan to create a separate template for each of these projects in its own Git repository:

Here I found a GitHub Repository from @matifali https://github.com/matifali/coder-templates. He has a repo for all templates and usees GitHub action to update the templates https://github.com/coder/setup-action.

I have a VPS where the following tools are installed:

• Docker
• Docker Compose
• Portainer
• NGINX Proxy Manager
• Coder

Coder is accessible exclusively via the browser at:
https://coder.example.com

There is also a relevant note in the Coder documentation:
https://coder.com/docs/tutorials/template-from-scratch

The structure of the template does not seem to be complete.

template-tour/
└── build
    ├── Dockerfile
    └── main.tf

Questions

1. How do I complete the template?
2. Are additional tools such as Git, PDF-Viewer, NPM, Prettier, ESLint, and EditorConfig installed as part of the template, or only later in the workspace?
3. Is there a GitHub repository for the template-tour template?
4. git clone into coder

Great questions! Let me address them one by one:

1. How to complete the template

The template-tour/ structure with Dockerfile + main.tf is actually complete for a Docker-based template. The Dockerfile defines your image and main.tf is the Terraform that provisions the workspace. You push the template to Coder using the CLI:

coder templates push my-template --directory ./template-tour/build

Or you can create it from the Coder UI by uploading the directory. For a Docker-based RStudio template, you'd want your main.tf to use the docker provider (similar to the examples in our docs) and include the RStudio module in your Terraform:

module "rstudio" {
  source   = "registry.coder.com/coder/rstudio-server/coder"
  version  = "1.0.28"
  agent_id = coder_agent.main.id
}

2. Tools in template vs. workspace

Best practice: install base tools (Git, R, RStudio Server, etc.) in the Dockerfile so every workspace starts ready to go. For project-specific tools (prettier, eslint, editorconfig), you have two options:

• Bake them into the Docker image if every workspace needs them.
• Install them via startup_script in the coder_agent resource or let users install them per-project.

For a PDF viewer in the browser, consider adding code-server (VS Code in browser) which has PDF preview extensions available.

3. Example repositories

• @matifali's coder-templates — great reference you already found.
• Our official example templates in the Coder repo.
• The Coder Registry has starter templates you can use directly.

The template-tour from the tutorial is intentionally minimal — it's a learning exercise, not a production template.

4. Git clone into Coder

Use the git-clone module in your template to automatically clone a repo when a workspace starts:

module "git-clone" {
  source   = "registry.coder.com/coder/git-clone/coder"
  version  = "1.0.18"
  agent_id = coder_agent.main.id
  url      = "https://github.com/your-org/your-repo"
}

Users can also just run git clone manually inside the workspace terminal.

Hope this helps! Let us know if you run into any specific issues.