Visual Studio Code Server: Passthrough USB devices from client to remote host via WebUSB

[flawedworld]

In my workflows it's very convenient for me to be able to access devices connected to my client from my remote development server. As a user I would like to connect a USB device to my client, pass it through to vscode.dev, and then choose a remote machine to pass the USB device to and use it from there.

[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!

[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!

[connor4312]

This is a general feature request for remotes, I don't think it's specific to code-server (though that's probably the most common use case)

[mjbvz]

Web UI extensions can already access usb devices connected to the client using webusb: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_69#_webusb-webserial-and-webhid-access-on-web

Allowing remote workspace extensions to also use the webusb API would require that we transparently proxy the webusb API from the client back to the remote. That's going to be a total bug farm

If your remote extension needs to talk to a usb device, instead:

• Have a UI extension that can use webusb (we may need API so extensions can force themselves to be run as web extensions, even on desktop)
• Expose vscode commands from that UI extension that do high level operations using webUSB (i.e. don't expose webusb directly)
• Have a workspace extension that invokes those commands