Running Theia IDE in Kubernetes

[rsoika]

Discussion

I am running Theia IDE in Kubernetes using the latest Docker image ghcr.io/eclipse-theia/theia-ide/theia-ide:1.67.100

This works at first perfect. But than I recognized a problem with extensions like GLSP Extensions - for example Open-BPMN.
The problem here is that these editors open a webview with a dynamic generated host name like

<uuid>.webview.ide.yourtheia.com

And this leads to a browser issue as this host is not known. I think this is somehow related to the environment variable THEIA_WEBVIEW_EXTERNAL_ENDPOINT which did not help me.

I solved this problem be defining wildcard DNS records for my domain and using DNS-01 challenges to generate wildcard certificates with Let's Encrypt. This all wasn't easy but at the end it works fine. I have written a blog post explaining the setup for a kubernetes cluster.

I wonder what your opinion on this topic is. I hope I haven't overlooked some secret switch that would have saved me all the effort. Is the problem I'm describing here known?

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[planger]

Hi @rsoika,

thank you for sharing your approach publicly! I'm sure this will help others too.

Real web views, as needed for custom editors implemented as VS Code extension, always have several challenges. This is why GLSP also comes with a native Eclipse Theia extension that doesn't rely on web views but directly integrates with the main DOM. So GLSP shouldn't be affected, or are you using the VS Code integration of GLSP, and use the resulting VS Code extension in Theia? If yes, I wouldn't recommend that due to performance, "nativeness", several features that are only available natively because the VS Code extension API doesn't provide compareable integration means.

Regarding dealing with Kubernetes deployments and Web Views, I'll best let a colleague of our Theia Cloud team comment. Theia Cloud provides a reusable base framework for deploying Theia apps on Kubernetes, so this may already address some of the hurdles you've hit.

[lucas-koehler]

Hi @rsoika , refering to #16918 (comment) :
Using Theia Cloud we noticed and researched the same behavior of the webviews:
IIRC correctly there is no switch to disable webviews being hosted at a sub-hostname. This is necessary for security purposes because it means each webview runs on its own hostname. With this, accessing the IDE domain or the domain of other running webviews violates the same-origin policy. This results in necessary restrictions on HTTP requests and accessing origin-scoped information such as cookies.

Theia Cloud provides launching and shutting down Theia based products (including the IDE) and further infrastructure such as workspace persistence, ingress management and OAuth integration. For the latter, we also use the OAuth2 proxy like you.

Generating a wildcard certificate yourself is necessary with Theia Cloud, too. I think you are on the right path there.

For hosting a singular instance of the Theia IDE for yourself, I think your approach is sensible. If you want to host multiple products and/or instances at once, you might benefit from Theia Cloud. Theia Cloud can handle configuring subdomains (such as for webviews) for launched instances. You can always post questions there, too, if you want to adopt it :)

[rsoika]

Hi,
thanks for your answers. I notice that the performance of my Open-BPMN extension is not the best.
And yes, I am using in this szenario my VS Code extension in Theia. As I understand Philip I should provide a separate extension for Theia here. I will try to optimize this in the future.
Thanks for your comments!