Opening my repo in VSCode in browser not working as expected

[jamiet-msm]

There was a lot of excited clamour yesterday on Twitter (mainly prompted by a Nat Friedman tweet) about the ability to browse to a repo in the GitHub web UI, press ‘.’, and the repo would open up in an instance of VSCode running in the browser. Unfortunately when I tried it, it didn’t work. This is what got displayed:

and the error I received in VSCode’s notifications pane was:

Unable to open ‘dataplatform’: Unable to resolve resource vscode-vfs://github/myorg/dataplatform

Note that this is not an open-source repo, it is not publicly available (we keep it private by virtue of being GitHub Enterprise customers).

Does anyone know why this might be the case? I’m assuming its because its not an open-source repo but wanted to check.

[tajmone]

Didn’t know about this new feature, so I tried it out on one of my repositories and it works like a charm.

jamiet-msm:

Note that this is not an open-source repo, we are GitHub Enterprise customers.

I don’t think that the license or the GitHub account type matter, but what might affect this is whether the repository is public or not — you didn’t mention it, so is the repository public or private?

As for the account type, I don’t know much about Enterprise and whether it would support the same features or not. But I’d start by focusing on the repository visibility status first.

[jamiet-msm]

thx. Its a private repo and I have updated my question to be explicit about that.

[brasic]

Hey @jamiet-msm, do you see any obvious errors in your browser console or network tab?

This feature should work for all public and private repositories. If your user can see the repo on github.com you should also be able to see it on github.dev.

[kdelee]

Privacy Badger was causing this same symptom for me. Disabling Privacy Badger and reloading fixed it.

Though I would say if the website could detect it was being blocked and indicate to the user, it would be a better UX than this pretty opaque error

[jamiet-msm]

Thanks you @brasic . I had a twitter convo with one of your GitHub colleagues and we got to the root cause: https://twitter.com/srivatsn/status/1425862550776807431?s=20. I’m getting a 403 on vscode-webview.net.

Still don’t know what I can do to solve it mind you.

[sudo-nautilus]

tajmone:

Didn’t know about this new feature, so I tried it out on one of my repositories and it works like a charm.

I thought it was an April fool thing. But now I understood.

[jamiet-msm]

@brasic We figured it out. We use zscalar (https://www.zscaler.com/) and it was zscalar that was blocking http://vscode-webview.net & http://github.vscode-unpkg.net.

In the words of our zscalar admin:

if you go to https://sitereview.zscaler.com/ you can enter an address to see it’s category, these two had non. I have submitted these for review as we have more aggressive web filtering setup to unknown sites… anyone can submit a review to Zscaler they check these over and once a category is set most things tend to start working correctly as almost all policies we have in Zscaler are built on category.

This is so new domains used in malware/spam/phishing etc are treated with more caution blocking downloads/uploads etc.

[tajmone]

jamiet-msm:

We figured it out.

Excellent! You should mark your solution as the solution.