Support for Remote Tunnels

[const-ae]

VSCode supports two different ways to run code on a remote server: via SSH connections or tunnels. There is already quite a bit of effort to enable SSH connections using the Open Remote SSH extension. Are there also plans to support tunnels?

I am interested in this feature, as I am on a university-managed cluster system, where we use Sun Grid Engine to submit jobs. VSCode's Tunnels allow me to submit an interactive job and launch a VSCode instance inside so that the cluster can manage the resources. In contrast, with the SSH extension, I can only connect to the head node, where heavy computations are forbidden.

[jmcphers]

Not at present, though feel free to file a feature request. A major challenge with supporting dev tunnels is that they rely on a proprietary Microsoft cloud relay service for handshake/discovery and auth, which we would need to rebuild or license for use in Positron.

One way you could achieve this with existing technology would be to use a reverse SSH tunnel at a designated port on the head node, which would enable Positron to connect through the head node as a gateway.

graph LR
positron -- ssh:2345 --> hn[head node]
cl[cluster node] -- reverse ssh --> hn
hn -- ssh:22 --> cl

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