Remote Theia Plugins execute commands in Theia container instead of their own sidecar

[garagatyi]

Description

When VS Code extension is running as Theia remote plugin it can execute a command in a terminal. At least Kubernetes extension does it to call kubectl commands.
And it always opens terminal to Theia container whereas in our case kubectl is placed inside of a remote plugin container.
We need to figure out:

• how to make terminal be opened in a remote container instead of Theia's one
• how to differentiate cases when we need to execute terminal in a plugin's container and when not.

Reproduction Steps

OS and version:

Diagnostics:

[garagatyi]

@benoitf @l0rd @AndrienkoAleksandr we will need to come up with the idea how to overcome this issue

[tsmaeder]

Which plugin API is used to execute the command?

[garagatyi]

I'm not familiar with theia APIs but after discussions with @evidolob and @AndrienkoAleksandr I think it is createTerminal API (Don't know whether the name is correct or there is some better identifier of the API)

[l0rd]

Today we had a call to discuss this issue and here is a summary of what we have discussed :

• Theia plugin API that need localhost access should be modified: when the plugin runs in a sidecar all actions need to be executed in that sidecar.
• We are going to start with the plugin API needed by the k8s VS code extension. That won't fix all VS Code extensions but will help defining a pattern easy to apply to other APIs as well.
• The solution should consist in the the following 4 steps:
  1. Maintain a remote plugins metadata in Theia that contains the sidecar details for each remote plugin (this is tracked by Theia remote plugins metadata #12392)
  2. Modify the API calls that access localhost to access the remote sidecar container instead when executed called by a remote plugin (this issue)
  3. Support running multiple VS Code extensions in the same sidecar (that's mainly to support jdt.ls extensions and tracked by Support running multiple VS Code extensions in the same sidecar #12395)
  4. Don't share the plugins folder anymore amongst all sidecars (this is mainly a cleanup step)
• @benoitf will work on the first 2 steps during next sprint, step 3 deserves a dedicated discussion and work should start the sprint after this one.

[benoitf]

merged there eclipse-che/che-theia#42