Has anyone ever wished that the Pangeo hubs had a VSCode/Theia-style IDE?

Cloud
#1

I’m curious what the community’s experience has been in being restricted to a JupyterLab + Jupyter Notebook environment by default. Do people feel like it is adequate for the kinds of research and analyses that people do on Pangeo? Do they feel limited at all by their inability to utilize a full development environment for their work?

If this has been discussed elsewhere please feel free to point me in that direction! I am trying to understand what kinds of workflows we might be missing with the default hub environments, or if this is less-of-an-issue than I’d assume.

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#2

Some of us have been using the Jupyter VSCode Proxy (https://github.com/betatim/vscode-binder) to enable a richer IDE when developing in the cloud. This seems to work well enough and provide quality of life improvement over the builtin editor in Jupyterlab.

#3

Have you got a write-up that you’ve worked from to make this happen? I wonder if such a thing would be useful for others who wish to use jupyterhub but with more traditional IDEs

#4

I think I just followed the link above and it worked first try (here’s my commit that added it to my hub: https://github.com/carbonplan/hub/commit/820f69d0a0a0df7a3aef81c748899db63319be1e).

#5

ah nice! I will check it out. Upon thinking a bit more I feel like from 2i2c’s perspective, we need to recommend using Theia over VSCode. If folks are paying us to deploy infrastructure, it probably violates the VSCode license to do this on behalf of another community :thinking:

#6

A significant portions of users here at CNES, the ones that have more development skills, greatly appreciate the VSCode integration. So yes, they felt limited by only the Jupyterlab editors. As this is an HPC Jupyterhub, it is deployed in a Conda environment directly.

We have also the desktop extension, which can be useful for using other softwares or just a web browser.

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#7

Yes - @scottyhq got the proxy @jhamman mentioned up and running on the ICESat-2 Hackweek Pangeo image earlier this year. If I recall correctly there were a few issues (search for “vscode” in the ICESat-2 Hackweek organization) until we updated the base image and forced the install from conda-forge. I haven’t updated recently, but at last use a couple months ago I was unable to install extensions on the proxy, which limited IDE feature use (e.g. no linter).

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