I find GitHub Codespaces a true mixed blessing. The uniform development environment is super democratizing, but a lot of the polish hinges on the use of VSCode as a development environment, with the terminal-based development approach feeling like an afterthought a lot of the time. Nowhere, to me, is this more apparent than in the ssh connection approach. gh codespace ssh is the way you open an ssh connection to the Codespace terminal, and boy howdy is it unstable. I estimate I lose my connection to a codespace at least once per hour, when actively working on it. If my laptop screen locks, it disconnects every time. If I never had terminal state, that would be fine, but that's not the case most of the time; most days, I've got a server running, possibly multiple. Those terminate in whatever state when the connection is dropped.

Of course, we can all guess what the solution is: "use tmux"; it's the solution to a lot of problems of this shape. However, what I really want is to be able to use tmux and not have to think about it, and that's what I'm going to show you here. I put this code in ~/.local/bin/,ghcs-iterm2 so that it is on my PATH¹.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -eu
set -o pipefail

SESSION_NAME="${1:-default-session}"

function get_recent_workspaces() {
  gh codespace list \
    --repo "github/github" \
    --json name,gitStatus,lastUsedAt,repository \
    --template "{{range .}}{{.repository}} {{.gitStatus.ref}} last used: {{ slice .lastUsedAt 8 }} _ {{.name}};{{end}}" |
    tr ';' '\n'
}

ws_file=$(mktemp)
cleanup() {
  rm -rf "$ws_file"
}
trap cleanup EXIT

get_recent_workspaces >"$ws_file"

if [ $(cat "$ws_file" | tr -d "\n \t" | wc -c) = 0 ]; then
  echo "No workspaces; create one"
  exit 0
fi

GH_CS_WORKSPACE=$(cat "$ws_file" |
  fzf -1 |
  awk '{print $7}')

if [ "" = "${GH_CS_WORKSPACE}" ]; then
  echo "No workspace selected"
elif [ -n "${GH_CS_WORKSPACE}" ]; then
  echo "Opening codespace $GH_CS_WORKSPACE for session $SESSION_NAME"
  gh cs ssh --codespace "$GH_CS_WORKSPACE" -- -t "tmux -CC new-session -A -s $SESSION_NAME"
fi

If you don't use iTerm2, this still works, you just drop the -CC from the tmux command.

Usage

$ ,gcsh-iterm2

That's it; that's the whole thing; this script will find the "right" codespace, or let you choose one, and connect to it, opening up the iTerm2 tmux interface for you with the remote session. This is not doing anything special or revolutionary, it's just composing a few basic CLI utilities.

Requirements

• you need to have tmux installed on your codespace. I do that in the codespaces dotfiles repository installer.
• your local machine needs the gh command line, fzf, and jq all installed

1. I name all my custom commands starting with a comma ↩︎

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