Using VSCode with Firebird

VSCode is a popular software development suite that can allow users to develop locally and then connect to a remote system (such as Firebird) to execute intensive tasks. While convenient, the main issue with VSCode is that the Remote-SSH extension runs vscode-server processes on the Firebird login node. These processes can be surprisingly resource-intensive (CPU and RAM) even when idle and they often fail to terminate when a user disconnects. There is, however, a solution that has worked well for multiple researchers.

Prerequisites

As prerequisites, you need:

an account on Github (either a personal account or through Swarthmore’s Github Enterprise)
VSCode installed on your local system, with Remote Explorer and Remote SSH extensions installed.

Usage

This method is based on these instructions. Essentially, you include steps within a Slurm batch script to download VSCode in your job’s temporary working (scratch) folder, unpack it, and launch a tunnel. Sample code for such a script is below, though it will need to be modified for your specific jobs:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -p compute
#SBATCH --mem=16g
#SBATCH --time=04:00:00
#SBATCH -c 4

set -o errexit -o nounset -o pipefail

MY_SCRATCH=$(TMPDIR=/scratch mktemp -d)

echo $MY_SCRATCH

#Obtain the tarball and untar it in $MY_SCRATCH location to obtain the
#executable, code, and run it using Github
curl -Lk 'https://code.visualstudio.com/sha/download?build=stable&os=cli-alpine-x64' | tar -C $MY_SCRATCH -xzf -
VSCODE_CLI_DISABLE_KEYCHAIN_ENCRYPT=1 $MY_SCRATCH/code tunnel user login --provider github

#Accept the license terms & launch the tunnel
$MY_SCRATCH/code tunnel --accept-server-license-terms --name cannontunnel