Life of a Workspace

Gitpod makes creating fresh workspaces as easy as clicking a button on a repository page. Gitpod’s continuous dev environments encourages you to create fresh workspaces rather than restarting older ones. This ensures that you are starting from a clean slate with proper configuration.

Timeouts

Any running workspace will automatically stop after some time of inactivity. Normally, this timeout is 30 minutes but is extended to 60 minutes if you have an Unleashed plan. Furthermore, Unleashed users can manually boost the timeout of a workspace to 180 minutes. This comes in handy, e.g. in case you want to go out for a longer lunch or meeting and don’t like restarting your workspace when coming back.

To do that, open the editor’s Command Palette (⇧⌘P or Ctrl+Shift+P) and search for “Gitpod: Extend Workspace Timeout”.

Note: If you do not have an Unleashed plan, this command is not available.

The timeout will always be reset to the full 30 minutes (or other applicable timeout depending on your subscription) by any activity — mouse move or keystroke — in the editor. If the editor is still open but the corresponding workspace has stopped, a dialog will pop up that lets you start the workspace again. Alternatively, you can just reload the browser or go to your workspaces and restart the workspace.

For convenience, closing the browser window/tab containing the workspace reduces the timeout to 3 minutes.

What happens if my workspace times out?

Not to worry, your changes are safe. You can navigate back to https://gitpod.io, look for your stopped workspace and start it again to continue working.

I want my team / client to review my work

If you want to send a preview URL to someone so they can review your work, you may do that as long as your workspace doesn’t time out. Make sure you set your application’s port’s visibility to public (docs).

In cases where you don’t know how long it will take until someone looks at your preview, it is best to use pull request preview deployments provided by your hosting provider.

Garbage Collection

Old, unused workspaces are automatically deleted.

Unused workspaces are deleted on a schedule. There is no fixed amount of workspaces that are kept by Gitpod. To know exactly how long your past workspaces will be kept, a message is displayed at the top of the workspaces list in your dashboard. Restarting a workspace resets the day counter for this particular workspace.

To prevent a workspace from being deleted, you can pin it in your list of workspaces. Pinned workspaces are kept forever.

Changes are Saved

Gitpod backs up the state of the /workspace/ folder between workspace starts, so that you can revisit them later. Attention: Files in other locations will not be saved!