Gitpod is now allowing sudo in runtime. After waiting for quite some time, now they give it.
What does it mean to users?
We don’t need to create a new workspace to add one or two small packages we need. It saves our hours.
How to activate this feature?
Please keep in mind this feature is still in beta. Here’s hoping they’ll launch it as a standard feature soon. Unfortunately, they don’t give any estimate on how long we have to wait for its release.
Here’s how to activate it:
Login to your gitpod account
Click your user’s icon at the top right. You’ll see a dropdown menu.
Click Settings
Scroll down to the bottom of the page until you see Enable-Feature Preview
Check its checkbox
Choose the IDE you want to use below it. I choose Theia, which is the default.
Then, launch a new workspace. As far as I know, it won’t work on the existing workspace.
Notes
If you’re using their default workspace image on your Dockerfile, your new workspace will have sudo without setting up anything.
If you want to use a more minimal setup for the new workspace, check my public repository.
My minimalist Debian 10 with sudo only
The link is on point 2 above. The public repository contains the Dockerfile for launching the new Gitpod workspace with:
Debian 10
Sudo
No bloat packages.
The effect I see immediately
I do see some effects immediately, such as:
Now, heroku pg:pull works out of the box. There is no need for any hack now.
Install any package is out of the box. I can even run sudo su if needed.
RVM is also working well, just like you run it on localhost
If I need to install old package that’s not available on the current OS, I can add something to /etc/apt/source.list. Thanks to the sudo.
