Inconsistent SSH Behavior between Tasks and Shells in VS Code Desktop

[burningion]

Bug description

When you open up VS Code Desktop, Tasks do not have the environment variable SSH_ AUTH_SOCK set properly. This means you cannot do SSH Agent forwarding within Tasks, and cannot sign commits using SSH keys.

Doing an env | grep SSH on a fresh task, you get nothing.

Doing an env | grep SSH on a created bash shell, you get a socket that works, and works with SSH Agent forwarding.

If I try to manually spin up the ssh agent in a Task shell, I get:

$ env | grep SSH
$

This shows that there is no SSH_AUTH_SOCK set. I can try to create it using ssh-agent:

$ eval $(ssh-agent -s)
Agent pid 4250
$ env | grep SSH
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-xPzWFGXpsd6T/agent.4249
SSH_AGENT_PID=4250

But if I try to verify my ssh agent forwarding with Github (I have an ssh key on my local machine and ssh agent forwarding enabled):

$ ssh -T git@github.com
ssh -T git@github.com
git@github.com: Permission denied (publickey).

I still do not get SSH agent forwarding. Once I set the SSH_AUTH_SOCK to one created by a Shell terminal (created and assigned automatically within every shell created with the plus sign in VS Code Desktop), I get authentication and signing with SSH agent forwarding both working properly.

# in the new bash shell
$ env | grep SSH
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/vscode-ssh-auth-sock-494130870
SSH_CONNECTION=UNKNOWN 65535 UNKNOWN 65535
SSH_CLIENT=UNKNOWN 65535 65535

# exported in the Task
$ export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/vscode-ssh-auth-sock-494130870
$ ssh -T git@github.com
Hi burningion! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

Steps to reproduce

See the above

Workspace affected

No response

Expected behavior

I expect consistent behavior across Tasks and newly created Shells for ssh agent forwarding. Otherwise I can't do Git commit signing with SSH keys from within the native UI, and have to manually open a shell and type out my commits.

Example repository

No response

Anything else?

No response

[burningion]

I think this would actually be fixed by #16108

[loujaybee]

I can replicate (Loom).

It has odd behaviour, as the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variables doesn't show for me in the browser (potentially expected behaviour, but feels odd). So, I'm not sure if this is an issue in our implementation or Remote SSH. There are a couple of what look like related issues open for Remote SSH, including:

• SSH Agent Forwarding not working with Remote SSH on MacOS (still a problem) microsoft/vscode#168202

There are some workarounds for starting the agent in bash_profile:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/troubleshooting - but I did not try those, yet.

@jeanp413 do you know any more?

[jeanp413]

Slack discussion : https://gitpod.slack.com/archives/C020VCB0U5A/p1676470768617929

TL;DR: task terminal does not have agent forwarding because they are created before ssh connection happens

[akosyakov]

I guess we could make supervisor to install own SSH_AUTH_SOCK and proxy it to IDE via an extension. Kind of the same what we do for gp open/preview.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.