Supporting GitHub Codespaces & Enterprise environments with the Plugin

[Clint-Chester]

Users

• Development manager tasked with ensuring a team is successful in using streaming data
• Developer on a team tasked with building new features using streaming data
• Developer at an org who manages a streaming platform while building new features that use streaming data
• Developer tasked with building pipelines for use in business analytics
• Other: [User type] tasked with [primary goal in the realm of streaming data]

Problems

Login flow experiences issues with the callback containing the authorisation code as it's expecting a local target and not a containerised environment. Unfortunately no workaround I can think of at the moment.

In addition, it would be great if you can specify a custom login URL to be able to reference a SSO login URL for the environment being logged into. You can workaround this by already having an authenticated session with Confluent Cloud in the browser.

Solutions

Will allow for greater adoption of the Confluent plugin for organisations and individuals making use of GitHub Codespaces.

Goals

Being able to login via OAuth / SSO to an environment with the Confluent VS Code Plugin using a Devcontainer / GitHub Codespace.

Background

Many organisations like the one I work in makes use of GitHub Codespaces for all its development activity, as it allows for preconfigured development environments. To help building streaming solutions on Confluent, a current issue with the development team is being able to connect to Confluent environment. We were hoping this could be solved with the plugin, but unable to authenticate with a Codespace.

Proposal

Probably a number of different ways you could do it, but one example I've done for another application outside the Confluent ecosystem was making use of an OAuth Device Flow authentication option to authenticate the Codespace. Happy to chat on further detail if needed.