Improve Offline Support (For when both Local and Remote are Offline Machines)

[advra]

Offline support allows the targeted host to be disconnected to the internet while the connecting client has internet access. As detailed here the vscode server tar file is download to the local machine then transferred to the host on ~./vscode-server/ directory location. While this works fine it will break if both local host and machine host do not have internet connection. As an improvement this can be done automatically rather than manually when installing the server binary to every host the client connects to.

The SSH-Remote JSON could define a path directory where the pre-downloaded binaries are located for ex ~/.vscode-server/installers. The vscode-server tar files can be downloaded ahead of time and deposited in this installer directory. If the client ssh to the host, it will attempt to download the tar file from microsoft "https://update.code.visualstudio.com/commit:${commit_id}/server-linux-x64/stable". Typically the server accessing the website will fail and deligate the download task to the client. In our case client will also fail as it has no internet connection either. As a fall back plan, the client can then reference the pre-downloaded binaries location we previously defined (~/.vscode-server/installers) and placed our tar file within to then install the vscode-server on host as normal.

[tanhakabir]

This doesn't quite work since we always need to match the client version of VS Code to the server. And if we've already downloaded the matching version of the server we do reuse it currently but we can't pre-install server binaries since they'll be incompatible with the version of VS Code you're running locally.

[vscodenpa]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 10 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[advra]

This doesn't quite work since we always need to match the client version of VS Code to the server

In an environment where internet connection does not exist for both local and remote machines I would think different versions wouldnt occur because updates are done manually anyway. In this case VSCode and vscode-server is setup once good to go until an update takes place. If an update takes place then a manual install of the local and vscode server binaries would happen. I would download VSCode of CommitIDX along with VSCodeServer of CommitIDX, transfer to a media then onto my offline machines.

And if we've already downloaded the matching version of the server we do reuse it currently but we can't pre-install server binaries

This works fine but with the current feature I am force to configure VSCode and VSCodeServer for every user. Why not automate this so when wget for VSCode Server fails to reach the microsoft website VSCode can instead look at the offline path where the vscoder-server tar lives within? For example placing instead of placing ./vscodeserver within user home directory ~ we can define it for all users at /some//other/dir/.vscode-server

[vscodenpa]

🙂 This feature request received a sufficient number of community upvotes and we moved it to our backlog. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[roblourens]

#1242