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FAQ

Questions?

Please file all questions and support requests at https://www.reddit.com/r/codeserver/ The issue tracker is only for bugs.

What's the deal with extensions?

Unfortunately, the Microsoft VS Code Marketplace license prohibits use with any non Microsoft product.

See https://cdn.vsassets.io/v/M146_20190123.39/_content/Microsoft-Visual-Studio-Marketplace-Terms-of-Use.pdf

Marketplace Offerings are intended for use only with Visual Studio Products and Services and you may only install and use Marketplace Offerings with Visual Studio Products and Services.

As a result, Coder has created its own marketplace for open source extensions. It works by scraping GitHub for VS Code extensions and building them. It's not perfect but getting better by the day with more and more extensions.

Issue #1299 is a big one in making the experience here better by allowing the community to submit extensions and repos to avoid waiting until the scraper finds an extension.

If an extension does not work, try to grab its VSIX from its Github releases or build it yourself and copy it to the extensions folder.

How is this different from VS Code Online?

VS Code Online is a closed source managed service by Microsoft and only runs on Azure.

code-server is open source and can be freely run on any machine.

How should I expose code-server to the internet?

By far the most secure method of using code-server is via sshcode as it runs code-server and then forwards its port over SSH and requires no setup on your part other than having a working SSH server.

You can also forward your SSH key and GPG agent to the remote machine to securely access GitHub and securely sign commits without duplicating your keys onto the the remote machine.

  1. https://developer.github.com/v3/guides/using-ssh-agent-forwarding/
  2. https://wiki.gnupg.org/AgentForwarding

If you cannot use sshcode, then you will need to ensure there is some sort of authorization in front of code-server and that you are using HTTPS to secure all connections.

By default when listening externally, code-server enables password authentication using a randomly generated password so you can use that. You can set the PASSWORD environment variable to use your own instead. If you want to handle authentication yourself, use --auth none to disable password authentication.

If you want to use external authentication you should handle this with a reverse proxy using something like oauth2_proxy.

For HTTPS, you can use a self signed certificate by passing in just --cert or pass in an existing certificate by providing the path to --cert and the path to its key with --cert-key.

If code-server has been passed a certificate it will also respond to HTTPS requests and will redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS. Otherwise it will respond only to HTTP requests.

You can use Let's Encrypt to get an SSL certificate for free.

How do I securely access web services?

code-server is capable of proxying to any port using either a subdomain or a subpath which means you can securely access these services using code-server's built-in authentication.

Sub-domains

You will need a DNS entry that points to your server for each port you want to access. You can either set up a wildcard DNS entry for *.<domain> if your domain name registrar supports it or you can create one for every port you want to access (3000.<domain>, 8080.<domain>, etc).

You should also set up TLS certificates for these subdomains, either using a wildcard certificate for *.<domain> or individual certificates for each port.

Start code-server with the --proxy-domain flag set to your domain.

code-server --proxy-domain <domain>

Now you can browse to <port>.<domain>. Note that this uses the host header so ensure your reverse proxy forwards that information if you are using one.

Sub-paths

Just browse to /proxy/<port>/.

x86 releases?

node has dropped support for x86 and so we decided to as well. See nodejs/build/issues/885.

Alpine builds?

Just install libc-dev and code-server should work.

Multi Tenancy

If you want to run multiple code-server's on shared infrastructure, we recommend using virtual machines with a VM per user. This will easily allow users to run a docker daemon. If you want to use kubernetes, you'll definitely want to use kubevirt to give each user a virtual machine instead of just a container. Docker in docker while supported requires privileged containers which are a security risk in a multi tenant infrastructure.

Docker in code-server docker container?

If you'd like to access docker inside of code-server, we'd recommend running a docker:dind container and mounting in a directory to share between dind and the code-server container at /var/run. After, install the docker CLI in the code-server container and you should be able to access the daemon as the socket will be shared at /var/run/docker.sock.

In order to make volume mounts work, mount the home directory in the code-server container and the dind container at the same path. i.e you'd volume mount a directory from the host to /home/coder on both. This will allow any volume mounts in the home directory to work. Similar process to make volume mounts in any other directory work.

Collaboration

At the moment we have no plans for multi user collaboration on code-server but we understand there is strong demand and will work on it when the time is right.

How can I disable telemetry?

Use the --disable-telemetry flag to completely disable telemetry. We use the data collected only to improve code-server.

How does code-server decide what workspace or folder to open?

code-server tries the following in order:

  1. The workspace query parameter.
  2. The folder query parameter.
  3. The workspace or directory passed on the command line.
  4. The last opened workspace or directory.

How do I debug issues with code-server?

First run code-server with at least debug logging (or trace to be really thorough) by setting the --log flag or the LOG_LEVEL environment variable. -vvv and --verbose are aliases for --log trace.

code-server --log debug

Once this is done, replicate the issue you're having then collect logging information from the following places:

  1. stdout.
  2. The most recently created directory in the logs directory (found in the data directory; see below for how to find that).
  3. The browser console and network tabs.

Additionally, collecting core dumps (you may need to enable them first) if code-server crashes can be helpful.

Where is the data directory?

If the XDG_DATA_HOME environment variable is set the data directory will be $XDG_DATA_HOME/code-server. Otherwise the default is:

  1. Linux: ~/.local/share/code-server.
  2. Mac: ~/Library/Application\ Support/code-server.

Enterprise

Visit our enterprise page for more information about our enterprise offerings.