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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, we have created our 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.

To request an extension for the code-server marketplace, please open a new issue and select the Extension request template.

If an extension is not available or does not work, you can grab its VSIX from its Github releases or build it yourself. Then run the Extensions: Install from VSIX command in the Command Palette and point to the .vsix file.

See below for installing an extension from the cli.

If you have your own custom marketplace, it is possible to point code-server to it by setting $SERVICE_URL and $ITEM_URL to point to it.

Where are extensions stored?

Defaults to ~/.local/share/code-server/extensions.

If the XDG_DATA_HOME environment variable is set the data directory will be $XDG_DATA_HOME/code-server/extensions. In general we try to follow the XDG directory spec.

You can install an extension on the CLI with:

# From the Coder extension marketplace
code-server --install-extension ms-python.python

# From a downloaded VSIX on the file system
code-server --install-extension downloaded-ms-python.python.vsix

How is this different from VS Code Codespaces?

VS Code Codespaces is a closed source and paid service by Microsoft. It also allows you to access VS Code via the browser.

However, code-server is free, open source and can be ran on any machine without any limitations.

While you can self host environments with VS Code Codespaces, you still need to an Azure billing account and you access VS Code via the Codespaces web dashboard instead of directly connecting to your instance.

How should I expose code-server to the internet?

Please follow ./guide.md for our recommendations on setting up and using code-server.

code-server only supports password authentication natively.

note: code-server will rate limit password authentication attempts at 2 a minute and 12 an hour.

If you want to use external authentication (i.e sign in with Google) you should handle this with a reverse proxy using something like oauth2_proxy or Cloudflare Access.

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 the 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.

You can use Let's Encrypt to get a TLS certificate for free.

Again, please follow ./guide.md for our recommendations on setting up and using code-server.

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-paths

Just browse to /proxy/<port>/.

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.

Multi-tenancy

If you want to run multiple code-servers 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 code-server 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

We understand the high demand but the team is swamped right now.

You can subscribe to #33 for updates.

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 ~/.local/share/code-server/logs directory.
  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.

Heartbeat File

code-server touches ~/.local/share/code-server/heartbeat once a minute as long as there is an active browser connection.

If you want to shutdown code-server if there hasn't been an active connection in X minutes you can do so by continuously checking the last modified time on the heartbeat file and if it is older than X minutes, kill code-server.

#1636 will make the experience here better.

How does the config file work?

When code-server starts up, it creates a default config file in ~/.config/code-server/config.yaml that looks like this:

bind-addr: 127.0.0.1:8080
auth: password
password: mewkmdasosafuio3422 # This is randomly generated for each config.yaml
cert: false

Each key in the file maps directly to a code-server flag. Run code-server --help to see a listing of all the flags.

The default config here says to listen on the loopback IP port 8080, enable password authorization and no TLS. Any flags passed to code-server will take priority over the config file.

The --config flag or $CODE_SERVER_CONFIG can be used to change the config file's location.

The default location also respects $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

Blank screen on iPad?

Unfortunately at the moment self signed certificates cause a blank screen on iPadOS

There does seem to a way to get it to work if you create your own CA and create a certificate using the CA and then import the CA onto your iPad.

See #1566.

Isn't an install script piped into sh insecure?

Please give this wonderful blogpost by sandstorm.io a read.

How do I make my keyboard shortcuts work?

Many shortcuts will not work by default as they'll be caught by the browser.

If you use Chrome you can get around this by installing the PWA.

Once you've entered the editor, click the "plus" icon present in the URL toolbar area. This will install a Chrome PWA and now all keybindings will work!

For other browsers you'll have to remap keybindings unfortunately.

Why can't I use VS Code's Remote extensions?

Unfortunately, Microsoft has opted to make VS Code's Remote SSH and Container extensions closed source and it is against their TOS to use the published extensions so we are unable to add them to our marketplace.

We may reimplement them at some point. You can follow #1315 for updates.

Enterprise

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