Another alternative that at least partially works around the slowness, in JetBrains we could only add hosts to the config for the currently connected workspace and any in the recent connections, instead of blindly adding every single one. A wildcard would be nice but maybe this could be a temporary bandaid.

Or, if we actually parse the host names, we can more smartly update the config and only make requests for workspaces that are new. Currently we interact with the config as one big block, so we have to update the whole thing at once as we have no knowledge of what might need to be added.

I think wildcard would still be nice, but if we decide to take one of these other routes I will create an issue in the JetBrains repo instead and close this one.

Another alternative, if the main workspaces query included all the agents even for off workspaces, this would at least make it faster probably, giant SSH config notwithstanding.

I enjoy this idea and think we should strive for one opinionated method for SSH configuration. The one drawback to wildcards (which might be a worthwhile cost) is users lose autocomplete when typing ssh coder.<TAB>.

Great point, I had not considered that. Hmmm maybe we can provide completions to compensate (coder ssh --completions or something, idk if there is some standard flag folks tend to use, but then this would be placed in /etc/bash_completions or wherever). 🤔

Ideally we would keep all completions coming in through coder completion.

Oof 🤦 I missed that. Yup, makes sense.

Is there a way to do dynamic completions? Like can the autocomplete do a coder ls and pull from that list?

Yup, it can be shell-dependent, but with Bash for example you can generate completions with:

_ssh() 
{
    local cur opts
    cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
    opts=$(coder ls --column workspace | tail -n +2)
    COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "$opts" -- ${cur}) )
    return 0
}
complete -F _ssh ssh

In use:

coder@dev27:~/coder$ ssh code-asher/
code-asher/dev27           code-asher/dev31           code-asher/not-nix         code-asher/projector-test  code-asher/scala           code-asher/test

We may also need to read the SSH config to get other hosts, since it looks like this replaces completions rather than augments them. 🤔 Edit: in my workspace, ssh is not completing host names by default anyway...

We could make the workspace list static to avoid an API call every time you TAB, that would be equivalent to how it works today. Or only make the calls when you have typed the coder. prefix.

Is there a way to do dynamic completions? Like can the autocomplete do a coder ls and pull from that list?

Yep, you can override the completion handler in serpent to do it all without touching any shell :)

Can it do it for a different command though or does it only work for itself? (Since we want completions for the regular ssh command.) Or will we have to generate those completions ourselves?

Not override, sorry, it used to override. You can specify a handler on the command, and that handler gets run in addition to the one that completes flags and additional arguments - if that's what you mean.

Ah yeah if I understand correctly, that can be used to add completions for itself (the coder binary) but it would not be able to add completions for some other random external binary (like ssh). (I think I made things confusing when I used the word command instead of binary.)

Basically we want it so when you type ssh <TAB> in the terminal (distinct from coder ssh <TAB>, although completions there would also be nice) it will auto-complete with Coder workspaces.

Or, at least, I think that is what we want.

Unassigned from myself for now due to time constraints, if this gets reassigned and it is not me then please let me know, happy to chat with whoever gets it to make sure my thoughts came across correctly, and I want to make sure whatever comes out is usable for the plugins.

ahh yeah I see, my bad!

@spikecurtis will this functionality change how Coder Desktop works?

@spikecurtis will this functionality change how Coder Desktop works?

With Coder Desktop, it won't be necessary to use the coder CLI binary to create the tunnel to your workspace.

However, CoderVPN uses .coder as a suffix to host names, not a prefix like our SSH config. So, we should start the work to migrate our ssh configuration to follow this pattern, since it tracks the semantic meaning of DNS order, and should avoid name collisions.

@bcpeinhardt, Can you help me decide if it's not already done? Thanks.

@matifali I would say the title of the issue (use wildcard SSH host names) is complete in 2.19 of Coder, but there's other work present in the comments worth looking at (mainly Spikes point about our current configuration not really following the semantics of DNS order). I wonder if we already have an issue for that 🤔
cc @code-asher

Thanks @bcpeinhardt. Yes, for following the semantics of DNS, we now have #16828.
So, I am closing this as completed.

Also, tagging @ThomasK33 to have more context on why we are switching to a suffix.

This broke so many things for us. This should have been optional.

@octoxan Can you tell us any more information about what broke and how?

@spikecurtis There are many tools we use (Tabby, Tinkerwell, etc and various automations we've built) that give you an option to connect to different remotes by parsing your ~/.ssh/config. Before it was very easy to not have to maintain this list manually in every single app as the way Coder was doing it before worked universally across many tools.

Now when I go to start working on a project I need to manually add it to half a dozen different apps manually.

Also, this update made it so we have to delete every single workspace connection in the Jetbrains plugin and recreate them. It no longer connects to any saved workspaces that were added to Jetbrains Gateway prior to 2.19, which is a major pain when you have so many workspaces.

Here's Tinkerwell for one example of an app, which used to have a nice drop down of 100+ connections I could use automatically, and now this list needs manually added to and things removed all the time.

Some flag to not do the wildcard and do the verbose method would save all of us over here a great deal of time lol