codespaces.el

This package provides support for connecting to GitHub Codespaces in Emacs via TRAMP. It provides a handy completing-read UI that lets you choose from all your created codespaces. Here’s a screenshot (running with vertico):

Here is an example use-package declaration:

(use-package codespaces
  :config (codespaces-setup)
  :bind ("C-c S" . #'codespaces-connect))

You will need to:

1. Have the GitHub command line tools (gh) installed.
   • If you use use-package-ensure-system-package, Emacs can install this for you automatically:

   (use-package use-package-ensure-system-package :ensure t)
   (use-package codespaces
     :ensure-system-package gh
     :config (codespaces-setup))
       

2. Authorize gh to access your codespaces:
   • Running gh codespace list will verify if permissions are correctly set.
   • You can grant the required permission by running gh auth refresh -h github.com -s codespace.

Because the TRAMP package, which underpins this package’s functionality, connects to remote servers over SSH, your codespace needs to have an SSH server running on it. If the Docker image that your codespace uses doesn’t have an SSH server, install sshd in your Dockerfile; for codespaces that use Debian-based images, you can add the following to .devcontainer/devcontainer.json:

"features": {
  "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/sshd:1": {
    "version": "latest"
  }
}

Other recommended configs

I strongly recommend you customize vc-handled-backends and remove the ones that you don’t use. I suffered considerable lag to Codespace instances before I did so.

(setq vc-handled-backends '(Git))

Use the host’s PATH as TRAMP’s remote path:

(add-to-list 'tramp-remote-path 'tramp-own-remote-path)

Use SSH connection sharing to reduce the number of new SSH connections that TRAMP needs to spawn for refreshing buffers. In your ~~/.ssh/config~ file, add the lines:

  	ControlMaster auto
	  ControlPath ~/.ssh/sockets/%r@%h-%p
	  ControlPersist 600

And to disable TRAMP’s default ControlMaster settings in your Emacs config, add:

(setq tramp-ssh-controlmaster-options "")

User-facing commands

• codespaces-connect brings up a list of codespaces, and upon selection opens a Dired buffer in /workspaces (the default Codespaces location).
• codespaces-start brings up a list of inactive codespaces and upon selection spawns a task that starts the selected codespace.
• codespaces-stop does the same but for stopping active codespaces.

Missing features

• Should ensure that gh codespace list works okay.
• Completion should sort codespaces by most-recently-used.
• Should have an unobtrusive special-mode buffer for outputs.
• Should have a nice transient.el UI.

Credits

Thanks to Bas Alberts for writing the code to register ghcs as a valid TRAMP connection method.

License

GPL3.