Persistent state between workspaces

[loujaybee]

Note: If we had discussions set up, this issue is more of a discussion than an issue/solution.

There are some situations where users need to have an element of persistence between their workspaces for the purpose of user configurations, and general continuity between the UX of a local env, and an ephemeral environment.

Some notable examples:

1. Bash history for auto-complete
2. IDE/plugin configuration files that aren't configurable [1]

This feels like a similar challenge that serverless applications had to overcome, by allowing mounting of file systems as a temporary solutions "bridge" to allow users to move from a stateful paradigm to a serverless/ephemeral one [1].

[mrsimonemms]

There's a couple of things I'd love to see:

• persisting files between workspaces to allow use of Oh My ZSH (this is a community-favourite request)
• in addition to allowing mounting of envvars to workspaces, allow mounting of files, similar perhaps to how GitLab does it with CI/CD variables. I'd find this incredibly useful as I regularly have different Kubeconfig files that I need - currently I have to store them as envvars and then echo $KUBECONFIG_NAME > ~/.kube/config. So much easier to be able to store the file and then override the $KUBECONFIG variable to point to it
  

[abkunal]

We are looking to adopt Gitpod with Pycharm for onboarding + development. The biggest friction seems to be that the IDE configuration doesn't persist on workspace restart.

Features surviving workspace restart

• IDE theme
• Debug and Test configuration

Features not surviving workspace restart

• Python interpreter configuration with Docker
• Modules indexing

Every time we restart a workspace, we need to configure the Python interpreter manually which in turn indexes the modules for this interpreter. It takes a total of 2 mins each time.

I was able to persist Debug and Test configuration using the workspace.xml file under the .idea folder but couldn't figure out any such configuration file for the interpreter config. I even checked the .cache and .config folder in home directory.

[akosyakov]

@abkunal Sorry for the late reply. I checked and these settings are stored as part of system config folder, so checking in of .idea folder is not enough. Could you try to follow https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/sharing-your-ide-settings.html to enable Settings Sync with JB account?

[loujaybee]

Going to close this one, I think it duplicates

• Is there any way to persist the home directory? #340
• Epic: Persisted Terminal History #9019

So let's continue our discussion in those issues 🙏

[loujaybee]

@abkunal, thanks a lot for your feedback! 🙏

Python interpreter configuration with Docker

Yep, this one is an issue, created a dedicated one here for us to look into! 🙏

• Python interpreter not automatically configured in PyCharm #9264

Modules indexing

For this one, check out the dedicated issue, and current workaround we're using on Gitpod right now.

• enable indexing with GoLand in prebuilds #9193
• Epic: JetBrains Prebuilds for Maven #6740