Code-server: FYI: 3.2.0 seems to be the last working version

[captainwasabi]

I'm on Centos7 if that makes a difference. Nice clean fresh install.

[nbetcher]

Yes, that is because of the glibc requirement of 2.18. There has been a lot of pain for those of us that work somewhere that isn't on the bleeding edge RHEL/Centos distribution.

PLEASE make the minimum required at least 2.17 or lower. I keep having to downgrade every new release after hoping the glibc/libstdc++ versions have been fixed. :-(

[captainwasabi]

ah, if that is indeed the problem then maybe this will help:

from https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/176608/cannot-update-glibc-on-centos-7#176613

Update your CentOS7, do a yum install of apr (apr-devel too?) and you're done.

I'm in crunch mode and can't deal with the whirlwind

[nbetcher]

@captainwasabi I already have glibc 2.17, but code-server 3.4.0 is requiring 2.18.
Regardless, I do not have root access, nor would they allow an upgrade of glibc even if it was available for RHEL 7.x.

[nhooyr]

Will be fixed soon. See https://github.com/cdr/code-server/issues/1738

[nhooyr]

New release is out!

https://github.com/cdr/code-server/releases/tag/v3.4.1

[captainwasabi]

Service still doesn't work.

...~]$ curl -fsSL https://code-server.dev/install.sh | sh
CentOS Linux 7 (Core)
Installing v3.4.1 rpm package from GitHub releases.

+ curl -#fL -o ~/.cache/code-server/code-server-3.4.1-amd64.rpm.incomplete -C - https://github.com/cdr/code-server/releases/download/v3.4.1/code-server-3.4.1-amd64.rpm
######################################################################## 100.0%
+ mv ~/.cache/code-server/code-server-3.4.1-amd64.rpm.incomplete ~/.cache/code-server/code-server-3.4.1-amd64.rpm
+ sudo rpm -i ~/.cache/code-server/code-server-3.4.1-amd64.rpm
[sudo] password for user:

To have systemd start code-server now and restart on boot:
  systemctl --user enable --now code-server
Or, if you don't want/need a background service you can run:
  code-server

...~]$ systemctl --user enable --now code-server
Failed to get D-Bus connection: No such file or directory

...~]$ sudo systemctl --user enable --now code-server
Failed to get D-Bus connection: No such file or director


...~]$ code-server
info  Wrote default config file to ~/.config/code-server/config.yaml
info  Using config file ~/.config/code-server/config.yaml
info  Using user-data-dir ~/.local/share/code-server
info  code-server 3.4.1 48f7c2724827e526eeaa6c2c151c520f48a61259
info  HTTP server listening on http://127.0.0.1:8080
info      - Using password from ~/.config/code-server/config.yaml
info      - To disable use `--auth none`
info    - Not serving HTTPS

[nhooyr]

Hmm. At the very least it's not related to the libraries so that's fixed. Looks like something wrong with systemd? Do you see the service in /usr/lib/systemd/user/code-server.service?

[nhooyr]

I'll give it a whirl with CentOS 7 on GCP.

[nbetcher]

@nhooyr No need, I've been using it on RHEL 7.8 (Maipo) for the past few hours. It works perfectly. Thanks!

@captainwasabi Not sure what happened with your setup, but I use Code-Server with a systemd config and it works fine for me. Lmk if you want my config file.

[nhooyr]

It looks like CentOS 7's systemd version is old enough that it has bugs with user units :(

I think we'll ship a templated global unit then as well.

[nhooyr]

Opened https://github.com/cdr/code-server/issues/1771

[nbetcher]

@nhooyr @captainwasabi This is my systemd config:

[Unit]
Description=VSCode Server IDE
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=popadmin
EnvironmentFile=$HOME/.profile
WorkingDirectory=$HOME
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=10

ExecStart=/home/popadmin/code-server-current/code-server --host 127.0.0.1 $(pwd)

StandardOutput=file:/home/popadmin/code-server-current/log/code-server-output.log
StandardError=file:/home/popadmin/code-server-current/log/code-server-error.log

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note: $HOME does not work correctly (resolves to root's $HOME since that's what it's being invoked as, but that is not a bug, that is by design.

[nhooyr]

@nbetcher nice! That looks good to me.

For anyone who just wants to use the bundled service, you can easily fix by running:

sudo cp /usr/lib/systemd/user/code-server.service /etc/systemd/system
sudo sed -i 's/\(Restart=always\)/\1\nUser=$USER/' /etc/systemd/system/code-server.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now code-server

It'll make code-server a system service and add your current user into the service file and start it for you.

[nbetcher]

@nhooyr What is the bug with User units? My process is running as the user defined in my config, or is this a CentOS specific issue (despite that it's basically RHEL)?

[nhooyr]

@nbetcher Not entirely sure, appears to be CentOS specific issue. I didn't look into it fully yet.

A user unit is different from specifying the user in the service. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/User

[nbetcher]

@nhooyr Ahh, I see what you mean. Interesting. In my case I just put it in system since both system and user units require root access to access the appropriate path, but I'm using code-server entirely different from the vision of code-server Enterprise. ;-)

[captainwasabi]

sudo cp /usr/lib/systemd/user/code-server.service /etc/systemd/system
sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/code-server.service
sudo sed -i 's/\(Restart=always\)/\1\nUser=$USER/' /etc/systemd/system/code-server.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now code-server

I think the vim line is unnecessary?

[nhooyr]

Yea, nice catch, removed.