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VSCode Remote Containers over SSH

When working remotely with a laptop, sometimes we might want access to more CPU power, RAM or a GPU. VSCode supports accessing a remote machine, and if Docker is installed on the remote machine, you can even connect to remote development containers. This approach tremendously saves battery life since computation is done on the remote server.

Requirements

Once that is done, you can follow the official guide.

You can now run powerful transformer models and more from your laptop!

Why not code-server?

code-server is a fully browser-based implementation of VSCode, and offers nearly the same experience. Compared to SSH, all that is needed is a client with a browser, and there is no need for SSH certificates.

However, the lack of support for VSCode Remote-Container and Remote-SSH extensions1 were a deal-breaker for me, since I primarily develop within development containers2.

code-server can be run in a Docker container too, and addtional code-server containers can even be created on-the-fly from within code-server itself. However, the configuration to automatically forward the relevant ports is going to be complicated.

Authentication Concerns

code-server uses a websocket stream. While nginx can be setup to require authentication before initiating the stream, there's no simple way to deauthenticate a websocket stream3 once its established, unlike SSH connections.

A comparison of features:

code-server VSCode Remote-SSH
Security Less secure4 As secure as SSH is
IP Visibility Can be hidden behind Cloudflare Public
Authentication Password or external server3 SSH password, 2FA, key or certificate
Client requirements Any browser SSH client
Access host filesystem Yes Yes
Forward ports from host Yes Yes
Full VSCode experience No Remote-Containers support Yes
Open Source Yes Extension is proprietary

  1. Sadly, VSCode is not as open as I used to think. ↩

  2. For the reasons I do this, see this post. ↩

  3. While nginx can proxy websocket connections, it can't terminate them once established. ↩↩

  4. Web applications have multiple vectors of attack, for example the OWASP Top Ten. ↩

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