Run vscodium in browser

[1kastner]

In some cases we want to code in a browser, e.g. when the code should be executed on a JupyterHub. However, currently the only option google provided me with was using code-server who are gathering the telemetries for themselves (see betatim/vscode-binder#22 and mentioned inside for further information). I would prefer to do the same without sharing telemetry data.

So I wondered whether it would be easy to not run vscodium on a remote server and being served the UI to a modern browser of my choice. To be even more specific, I would love this to work with vscodium but I am a bit lost in this repository on how to achieve this.

Thank you so much for this project and some inspiration!

[GitMensch]

Only related by the topic, but did you tried to use Theia for the browser parts? Can you explain where the difference between this and your suggested option is?

[1kastner]

I haven't tried out Theia and it seems like it should already work! As far as I have read in this blog article, Theia does not yet fully support the API for extensions that do work with vscode/vscodium. Furthermore, on their github page they suggest to run the editor in a separate docker container instead of offering OS-native installers like vscodium. That does change a bit how a binder example like here can be created with smallest effort. I would prefer just to tweak a few lines and plug together my system that will work over several versions. That e.g. forbids to just copy a docker file that specifies one IDE (see e.g. the theia Python IDE) by hand and translate this into a Shell script for installation. Tools like dockerfile-to-shell-script or dkr2sh both describe themselves as naive and one needs to be careful with the result.

[cothan]

If you have student github account, you can definitely try gitpod.io https://gitpod.io/

Disclaimer: I don't have any relation with gitpod, I'm coding on RPi4 and find out that using gitpod make it easier, faster UI for me to code.

[1kastner]

Thank you very much for pointing that one out. I haven't used it for quite a while. But it seems that it is open source now so that I could even host the IDE myself - see its git repo. Under the hood they use Theia. So mainly gitpod adds all the options for integrations into different platform such as GitHub, GitLab etc.

[Felx-B]

Hi there,
I compiled VSCode for browser in this repo : https://github.com/Felx-B/vscode-web
It is a full browser version of VSCode like official playground

This way you should be able to write your own extension with FileSystemProvider and remote execution.

[1kastner]

That is great news! Did you check whether telemetry data is sent? I would love to give it a shot whether it can be integrated into MyBinder like it has been done at https://github.com/betatim/vscode-binder

[Felx-B]

By default there is no telemetry.
You can choose to add your own by settings some properties in product.json file.
In this file you can setup any key of IProductConfiguration

It seems you can only use ApplicationInsight telemetry by setting these keys :

readonly enableTelemetry?: boolean;
readonly aiConfig?: {
		readonly asimovKey: string;
	};