Integrated support for SSH and, indirectly, VS Code & GitHub Copilot

[struanb]

This significant release offers integrated SSH server support, and indirectly support for VS Code server and GitHub Copilot.

Dockside now facilitates:

• SSH access to any devtainer by authorised developers;
• use command line tools that benefit from key forwarding, such as git;
• seamless VS Code remote development via the Remote SSH extension.

Dockside achieves this through:

• Provisioning an SSH and a wstunnel server daemon for each devtainer.
• Maintaining each devtainer's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file with the public ssh keys of the devtainer owner and any other developers with whom the devtainer is shared.
• A UI function to open SSH on a devtainer directly with a single click.
• Setup instructions, integrated in the Dockside UI, for developers needing to install the wstunnel helper client and configure their local ~/.ssh/config

N.B. Dockside now enables SSH access by default for all new devtainers, though this can be disabled by setting ssh.default=0 in config.json. See documentation for full details on configuring Dockside for SSH access and see the new Dockside UI for details on configuring clients to tunnel ssh over wstunnel.

WARNING: Dockside v3.0.0 takes over control of ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in new devtainers. Accordingly, SSH support is not compatible with any profiles that mount over this file (or over ~/.ssh if the mounted filesystem contains an authorized_keys file). You should take care to disable SSH in such profiles as, otherwise, if you make changes manually to this file on a devtainer that has SSH enabled, your changes may be lost.

Full Changelog: v2.4.2...v3.0.0

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This discussion was created from the release Integrated support for SSH and, indirectly, VS Code & GitHub Copilot.