Hi All,
Back in 2022 I posted a showcase of a Visual Studio Code interactive app using Coder’s code-server. This app has worked out really well for us and his receive minor updates over the last few years.
However, with recent introductions of AI plugins, such as GitHub Copilot, we have seen the need for supporting the Microsoft version as well. Luckily Microsoft have released their own self-hostable web server similar to code-server that can be used. The only big gotcha I’ve found so far is that the port forward feature doesn’t exist (code-server has a really nice ‘/proxy’ url feature that integrates in with VSCode’s native port forwarding).
So we’ve updated our app to support multiple vendors/editions of VSCode. For now I’ve only included Coder Code-Server and Microsoft VSCode Standalone Code CLI. The Microsoft code standalone cli is used to download and execute their version of a VSCode web server.
We’ve also just made improvements to allow the use of containers that don’t have code-server/code installed inside the container. This was more a limitation of our implementation then doing so being difficult.
You can find our updated app here https://gitlab.com/nmsu_hpc/ood-apps-nmsu/-/tree/main/vscode?ref_type=heads. We use a monolithic repo for all our apps with a lot of shared code. If you intend to use this one app by itself you’ll need to do a bit of surgery to un-share some code and remove some ruby from the erb files.
Feel free to post if you have any questions or suggestions.