VSCode Extension to run ARE session

Technical
1

Hello everyone.

Since many NCI users have VSCode as their main text editor, I thought it would be useful having a VSCode extension to start and connect to an ARE session.

This to have a better workflow rather than having to start an ARE session separately, get the ssh config parameters and then connect through VSCode (using the remote-ssh extension).

At the moment, I don’t think there is any extension that allows such direct connection, but I was wondering if anyone had already set up such a thing ( Maybe @Scott?).

Would love to know more and in case work on that if other people are interested in having such a workflow.

Cheers
Davide

2

There’s no api for starting a session, so you’d need to scrape the web interface to do that or work out what the web interface submits to the pbs queue.

If a session is already running you can get the connection info from the ~/ondemand directory. https://git.nci.org.au/saw562/tools/-/blob/master/ood sketches out how this can be done. I’ve been putting this together mainly for easier vnc access but ./ood ssh should ssh into the most recent session

3

At the moment I’m already getting infos through the ~/ondemand directory, and everything works.

I was mainly looking for a more “straightforward” way to run the session directly from gadi (by submitting a PBS job) and, ultimately, to do this using a VSCode API.

Do you know where can I get more information on what the web interface submits to the pbs queue to start an ARE session?

4

qstat -f on a running ARE job should show everything used to start the queue jobs, I don’t know how ondemand works internally though

5

Not what you wanted, but related, some OOD services provide VS Code in a browser

https://www.emsl.pnnl.gov/MSC/UserGuide/ood/vscode.html

https://hpc.nmsu.edu/discovery/ondemand/vscode/

It appears this is one of OODs supported apps

https://osc.github.io/ood-documentation/latest/install-ihpc-apps.html

and this is the app they are running:

6

Nice. I’d imagine a VS Code service would be appreciated by a broad range of NCI users. Perhaps worth dropping a question to NCI Help @atteggiani?

7

@Aidan I had read about the possibility to have OOD services in VSCode browser. I have never used VSCode browser so maybe I’ll check it out.
However, I think most people would still prefer using their local VSCode so I’m gonna look more into this and maybe follow @dougiesquire’s suggestion and contact NCI directly.
I’ll keep you posted.