Running VS Code And Eclipse Theia inside ShinyProxy

Screenshots

This repository explains how to run VS Code and Eclipse Theia as a native webapp in ShinyProxy. This example works in ShinyProxy 2.5.0 or later.

Building the Docker image

VS Code

The VS Code project does not provide official Docker images for running VS Code as a webapp. Fortunately, the Code Server project provides ready to use Docker images. Note that the VS Code provided in these images are not using the official builds of Microsoft, therefore they do not use the same Marketplace as the VS Code which you can download from the Microsoft site, see their FAQ.

You can pull the Docker image using:

sudo docker pull codercom/code-server:latest

Eclipse Theia

Eclipse Theia is an extensible framework to develop full-fledged multi-language Cloud & Desktop IDEs and tools with state-of-the-art web technologies.

(from Theia GitHub)

As an example you can pull the Docker image containing the base IDE:

sudo docker pull ghcr.io/eclipse-theia/theia-blueprint/theia-ide

Installing Extensions

You can customize the VS Code image so it contains some extensions by default:

FROM codercom/code-server:latest

RUN code-server --install-extension ikuyadeu.r-pack

ShinyProxy Configuration

Create a ShinyProxy configuration file (see application.yml for a complete file), containing:

proxy:
  specs:
    - id: vscode
      container-image: codercom/code-server:latest
      port: 8080
      container-cmd: ["/usr/bin/entrypoint.sh", "--bind-addr", "0.0.0.0:8080", "--auth=none", "--disable-update-check", "--disable-telemetry", "."]
      websocket-reconnection-mode: None
    - id: theia
      container-image: ghcr.io/eclipse-theia/theia-blueprint/theia-ide
      port: 3000
      websocket-reconnection-mode: None

Both projects require minimal configuration in ShinyProxy to work. An improvement on this setup could be to mount a persistent workspace for the user:

proxy:
  specs:
    - id: vscode
      container-image: codercom/code-server:latest
      port: 8080
      container-cmd: ["/usr/bin/entrypoint.sh", "--bind-addr", "0.0.0.0:8080", "--auth=none", "--disable-update-check", "--disable-telemetry", "/workspace"]
      container-volumes: [ "/tmp/vscode/#{proxy.userId}/work:/workspace"]
      websocket-reconnection-mode: None
    - id: theia
      container-image: ghcr.io/eclipse-theia/theia-blueprint/theia-ide
      container-volumes: [ "/tmp/theia/#{proxy.userId}/work:/home/project"]
      container-env:
      port: 3000
      websocket-reconnection-mode: None

Note: by default the processes in the VS Code image run under a non-root user. Depending on the configuration of the volume, this user may not have write access in the workspace directory. A user can use the following command to fix this:

sudo chown -R coder:coder /workspace

In order to automate this, you can modify the /usr/bin/entrypoint.sh of the Docker image.

Screenshots

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