Self-contained workspace builds

Currently, there are two ways in which the workspace boot sequence can occur:

1. Remotely: Coder uploads assets (including the Coder agent, code-server, and JetBrains Projector) from coderd to a workspace.
2. Self-contained: workspaces control the boot sequence internally; the workspace downloads assets from coderd. This requires curl to be available in the image.

Beginning with v1.30.0, the default is self-contained workspace builds, though site managers can toggle this feature off and opt for remote builds instead.

To toggle self-contained workspace builds:

1. Log into Coder.
2. Go to Manage > Admin.
3. On the Infrastructure page, scroll down to Workspace container runtime.
4. Under Enable self-contained workspace builds, flip the toggle to On or Off as required.
5. Click Save workspaces.

Build errors are typically more verbose for remote builds than with self-contained builds.

Troubleshooting

In certain cases, your workspace may not trust the coderd TLS certificate. This will result in the error below:

stream logs from workspace: Failed to create Container-based Virtual Machine

To resolve this, you will need to copy the coderd TLS certificate into your Docker image's certificate trust store. Below are examples for doing so, for the major distributions:

Debian and Ubuntu distributions

RUN apt-get install -y ca-certificates
COPY my-cert.pem /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/my-cert.pem
RUN update-ca-certificates

CentOS, Fedora, RedHat distributions

RUN yum install ca-certificates && update-ca-trust force-enable
COPY my-cert.pem /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/
RUN update-ca-trust extract