Open source dev tools for any job

Open source developer tools have become indispensable in modern software development. By empowering collaboration and streamlining workflows, open source dev solutions help developers build faster and iterate quicker across languages and platforms. In this roundup, we'll highlight some of the most popular new open source tools to boost your productivity.

The Rise of Open Source Developer Tools

Over the past decade, open source has radically transformed software development. Today, developers rely on open source languages, frameworks, libraries, and tools to quickly build everything from web apps to embedded systems.

Open source developer tools lead to faster iteration cycles and lower costs. They enable developers to tap into collective knowledge to solve problems. And they allow building on existing solutions rather than reinventing the wheel.

According to recent surveys, upwards of 70-80% of developers use open source components in their tech stacks. Popular solutions like React, Node.js, and MongoDB underpin many modern applications. And niche tools are emerging to optimize specific parts of the dev workflow.

In this roundup, we'll highlight some of the most popular and promising new open source dev tools across a range of categories. Whether you build on Windows or Linux, use Python or JavaScript, leverage managed cloud services or self-hosted solutions - open source has something for you. Let's dive in!

Top New Languages

Programming languages continue to evolve with new releases that introduce modern features, improved performance, and better developer ergonomics. Here we'll look at some of the most popular open source languages that have emerged in recent years.

Rust

Created by Mozilla, Rust is a systems programming language focused on speed, memory safety, and parallelism. It's ideal for building high-performance applications, embedded devices, distributed services, and other scenarios where C/C++ are traditionally used.

Rust offers several open source dev tools including:

• Cargo - Rust's official package manager and build tool. It handles dependencies, building, testing, and more through Cargo.toml config files.
• rustfmt - Auto-formatter for ensuring consistent Rust code styling and layout.
• Rust Language Server - Enables IDE features like auto-complete, go to definition, and inline errors via language server protocol.

Go

Developed by Google, Go (or Golang) is a statically-typed language known for its simplicity, concision, and native support for concurrency. It's widely used for building web services, network apps, DevOps tooling, and more.

Notable open source Go tools include:

• Go Modules - Built-in dependency management using semantic versioning and central proxy servers.
• gofmt - Auto-formats Go source code predictably and consistently.
• Delve - Go debugger enabling step execution, variable inspection, and breakpoint support.

Kotlin

Created by JetBrains, Kotlin is a general purpose language designed for Java/JVM interoperability. It offers functional programming features and streamlined syntax for writing concise, robust code.

Useful open source Kotlin tools:

• Kotlin Compiler - Kotlin's production-ready compiler for translating Kotlin to Java bytecode.
• Kotlinx Coroutines - Asynchronous programming framework with first-class support for coroutines.
• Exposed - Kotlin SQL library for object-relational mapping and database access.

Leading Frameworks

Developers are increasingly relying on open source frameworks to build and connect UI components, access databases, create API services, and more. Here we'll highlight some of the most popular options.

React

Created by Facebook, React is a ubiquitous JavaScript library for building interactive user interfaces by composing reusable UI components. React is known for its declarative approach, virtual DOM, and extensive ecosystem.

Notable open source tools for React include:

• Create React App - Project bootstrapping tool for building React apps with no config needed.
• React DevTools - Debugging extension for inspecting React component hierarchy and state.
• React Testing Library - Lightweight solution for testing React components without relying on implementation details.

Angular

Developed by Google, Angular is a TypeScript-based framework for building single-page applications using MVC architecture. It provides powerful tooling for rapid development across web, mobile, and desktop.

Open source Angular dev tools include:

• Angular CLI - Command line interface for creating projects, generating code, running tests, and more.
• Angular Language Service - Editor plugin for auto-complete, error checking, and navigation.
• Angular Router - Declarative routing library used to build single-page application navigation.

Django

Django is a hugely popular open source web framework written in Python. It enables rapid development through components like an ORM, template engine, routing, admin interface, and more.

Notable open source Django tools:

• Django Debug Toolbar - Displays debug information like queries and templates during development.
• Django REST Framework - Powerful toolkit for building web APIs with Django.
• Django Allauth - Application providing easy user registration, authentication, social login, and account management.

Cutting Edge Libraries

Beyond frameworks, developers are leveraging libraries for UI styling, data fetching, testing, state management, and more. Here are some exciting open source libraries to watch.

Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces without opinionated styling. It generates highly reusable CSS classes for layout, typography, color, and more.

Open source tools for Tailwind include:

• Tailwind CLI - Tool for checking classes, previewing color palette, and building production assets.
• Tailwind Play CDN - Online editor for testing Tailwind CSS visually.
• DaisyUI - Tailwind component library with themes and components for rapid prototyping.

SvelteKit

SvelteKit is a framework for building web applications using Svelte, a compiler that converts components into highly optimized vanilla JavaScript. It enables server-side rendering, routing, and code splitting.

Open source SvelteKit tools:

• Svelte Language Tools - VS Code extension providing syntax highlighting, linting, auto-complete, and more.
• SvelteKit Explorer - Visual GUI for exploring and debugging SvelteKit apps.
• SvelteKit RealWorld Example App - Project template implementing real-world features using SvelteKit.

Redux Toolkit

Redux Toolkit is the official opinionated Redux framework for building scalable state management with best practices built-in. It simplifies common Redux use cases.

Tools include:

• configureStore() - Wrapper simplifying store setup with good defaults.
• createReducer() - Generates reducers with immutable state updates.
• createAsyncThunk - Handles async request lifecycle.

Essential Testing Tools

Testing is crucial for writing stable, resilient applications. Here we'll look at some indispensable open source testing frameworks used by developers everywhere.

Jest

Created by Facebook, Jest is a popular JavaScript testing framework supporting unit, integration, snapshot, and UI testing. It provides built-in assertions, mocks, coverage reports, and works with React, Angular, Node.js, and more.

Cypress

Cypress is a developer-friendly E2E testing framework for web applications. It enables reliable browser testing without Selenium or WebDriver. The open source core is complemented by a paid dashboard service.

React Testing Library

React Testing Library is a lightweight solution for testing React components without relying on their implementation details. It encourages user-centric testing based on UI appearance and behavior.

Top IDEs & Editors

For coding, developers have their choice of full-featured integrated development environments (IDEs) or lightweight text editors. Here we'll cover some popular open source options.

Visual Studio Code

Created by Microsoft, VS Code is a hugely popular open source editor available across platforms. It offers thousands of extensions, built-in Git support, debugging, and customization options.

Neovim

Neovim is an open source text editor built for extensibility and usability. It's a refactor of Vim focused on performance and supporting embeddable UIs.

IntelliJ IDEA

JetBrains' IDEA IDE provides development support for JVM languages like Java and Kotlin. The open source Community Edition provides rich code assistance, navigation, code analysis, and more.

Atom

Atom is an open source, hackable text editor from GitHub. It has cross-platform editing, smart autocompletion, file system browser, and huge library of packages and themes for extensibility.

Deployment & Hosting Tools

Developers have an expanding array of options when it comes to deploying and hosting applications thanks to open source tools and managed platforms. We'll look at some top solutions here.

Netlify

Netlify is a popular fully managed platform for deploying JAMstack sites and web apps with continuous deployment from Git. It provides global CDN, custom domains, staging environments, and AWS Lambda functions out of the box.

Vercel

Vercel is a platform for deploying and hosting JAMstack websites and web services by automatically deploying Git repositories. It supports Next.js, zero-config deployments, and previewing changes in realtime.

Dokku

Dokku is an open source PaaS built on Docker and Heroku. It helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications using command line tooling similar to Heroku.

Cloudron

Cloudron makes it easy to host web apps on your server or own infrastructure. It's an open source platform for effortless, self-hosted apps behind your firewall.

Trending DevOps Tools

Modern DevOps practices involve continuous integration, infrastructure as code, monitoring, and more. Here we'll highlight some of the most popular open source tools in this space.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is GitHub's native CI/CD platform for automating developer workflows including testing, releases, and deployments directly within Git repositories. Over 5000 community-contributed actions are available.

Terraform

Terraform by HashiCorp is a infrastructure as code tool for defining, provisioning, and managing cloud, on-prem, and hybrid infrastructure safely and efficiently. Providers are available for all major cloud vendors.

Grafana

Grafana is an observability platform for visualizing metrics and logs using interactive dashboards. Users can create graphs, alerts, and insights using data from Prometheus, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, and more.

CircleCI

CircleCI provides a continuous integration and delivery platform for automating software builds, tests and deployments. The open source addition offers convenience features for GitHub and Bitbucket.

Top Package Managers

Package managers streamline installing, updating, and managing dependencies across languages and platforms. Here we'll look at some essential open source package managers.

npm

npm is the default package manager for Node.js and the largest software registry in the world. It powers the entire JavaScript ecosystem and can install modules locally or globally.

Cargo (Rust)

Cargo downloads and builds Rust packages and dependencies while managing semantic versioning. It's an integral part of the Rust experience.

Composer (PHP)

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP that allows declaring and installing packages over Packagist. It also handles autoloading and is integral to modern PHP development.

Pip (Python)

Pip installs and manages Python packages. It integrates with PyPI as the default package index. Virtualenv and pip together form a standard Python development environment.

Conclusion

The open source ecosystem continues to provide invaluable tools for developers across the software lifecycle. In this roundup, we covered notable new languages, frameworks, libraries, testing tools, deployment platforms, editors, and more.

While not exhaustive, the solutions highlighted represent some of the most popular and promising options available today. Open source dev tools now form the foundation for development workflows across organizations and tech stacks. Whatever language or platform you use, leveraging these community-driven tools can optimize your productivity and end results.

Platforms like DevHunt offer exposure for the latest open source developer tools and innovations. By crowdsourcing ratings, reviews, and reactions, DevHunt enables developers to collectively curate the most useful open source solutions.

The future looks bright for open source technology. We hope this overview of trending tools provides ideas and insights you can apply in your own projects today and down the road. What other open source dev tools are you excited about? Let us know on DevHunt!