Custom Theia Editor Support in Eclipse Che

[JonasHelming]

This is an umbrella ticket for the use case to use Che with custom Theia editors. Any comments and/or feedback is appreciated.

Use Case

We would like to use Che as a workspace manager for custom Theia-based editors in a multi-user scenario. Therefore, Che is used for creating, deleting, starting and stopping workspaces. In order to allow for better integration in custom portals, we would like to use Che’s REST API rather than the Che dashboard. Therefore, we also do not want to extend Che-Theia, but provide a fully custom Theia product that is provided as a container from the registry.
The available types of workspaces are defined via devfiles. Thus, Che’s devfile support for cloning projects and running commands on workspace creation, etc. is required.

Current Status

What works fine:
Managing workspaces via the REST API so that workspaces can be created, deleted, started, stopped from a custom portal
Specifying and starting the custom Theia-based editor products as defined in the devfile
Integrating external authentication

Where we are stuck is adding the devfile’s support for cloning projects and/or running commands on workspace creation events. While those seem to be mainly taken care of by Che-Theia plugins, we weren’t able to get them to work in custom editors (see #20128). Also, we weren’t able to run the very promising sounding devworkspace-operator in our test scenarios based on kubernetes. As a workaround, we also tried to access the devfile from our custom editors by just integrating the Che Plugin API in order to implement cloning, etc., ourselves in the custom editor, but weren’t able to get @eclipse-che/plugin to work (see #20259).
This is about allowing Che to do the clone operation : #15973

[benoitf]

I think that switching to devWorkspace would allow you to get rid of the 'cloning' part as cloning is performed at operator side now. (no need to do cloning at IDE side)

And for the @eclipse-che/plugin it requires an extension provided by che-theia as well (that provides a custom namespace)

[tsmaeder]

With the recent addition of contribution filtering support, having custom Theia-based editors is an interesting proposition for cases where we want a reduced, custom feature set. Supporting Jonas and fixing any gaps we have in documentation and support would help future projects of this kind.

[l0rd]

+1 to use DevWorkspace for this work (c.f. high level architecture design, ongoing work)

[che-bot]

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[debovema]

@l0rd @benoitf : is it possible to add a working example for such a scenario with DevWorkspace ?
I have the same use case as @JonasHelming and I find it hard to gather the prerequisites for a custom Theia-based image to behave like a Che-Theia image.

[l0rd]

@debovema @JonasHelming is there a container image that runs a Theia-based IDE we could use?

[debovema]

It seems that Theia does not provide Docker image any more.
So I pushed one here : https://quay.io/repository/mdebove/theia
I run it like this : docker run -it -p 3000:3000 quay.io/mdebove/theia:1.32

[koegel]

There is a docker image available here that is used to deploy a demo Theia IDE called Blueprint for the try now button on the Theia webpage.