microsoft / microsoft/vscode-remote-release

Persistent SSH session

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feature-request plan-review remote ssh
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Description

A lot of users of our Julia extension love the remote SSH features, they are super useful in a scientific research computing context!

One thing that has come up a lot lately, though, is that folks want an ability to have a persistent session on a server that they can disconnect from and then reconnect to way later.

The scenario is essentially something like this:

  1. User connects to some remote server via the Remote SSH extension
  2. They do some work
  3. They get interrupted and close their local VS Code instance
  4. They do something else for a couple of days
  5. The now want to reconnect to the server, and ideally nothing was shut down on the server. For example, if they opened a REPL in step 2 and started a Julia instance in that REPL, it would still be running, and was never shut down. Similarly with pretty much all other runtime state they had.

I think this might be related to https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release/issues/440, but what I'm really asking for is not just an option to change the timeout, but some way to make the timeout infinit, so that the server session never shuts down.

This might also require some kind of UI, maybe a command like "Disconnect but keep server alive" or something like that, not sure.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading the Remote SSH extension behavior described in this issue and the related issue #440; the payload names no files or tests. Done means a user can disconnect from VS Code, reconnect days later, and find the remote server and runtime state, such as a Julia REPL, still alive.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
vscode
Domain
devtools, infrastructure
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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