Headless LiveShare collaborative session

[ScatteredRay]

So, for one of our workflows, we have a remote host running an application, that we'd like to be able to have multiple members of the team be able to log into, and edit, with the collaborative features of live-share. Currently, we are able to use a combination of Remote-SSH and Live-Share to do the bare minimum, in that one person can connect to the session, and then post a live share link to collaborate, but it's not persistent so we're always trying to distribute links, and choose a host.

It'd be most ideal if we could just host a headless vscode instance running on the machine itself, and let others join and leave it as they please. It'd work for us with either a link from a headless session like live-share uses currently, or just to be able to use Remote-SSH to join a collaborative live-share session

I saw that #74 has already been created. But this seemed to be closed as part of the Remote-SSH workflow, but my use-case isn't specifically about remoting, but more specifically about a persistent collaborative space.

[daytonellwanger]

So is the issue that you need the ability to change hosts? If the same machine is always acting as the host, you could just keep the same Live Share session running indefinitely and continue using its join link. Or are you bumping into issues with a long-running session?

[eladts]

I think the problem with Remote SSH + Live Share is that a user has to open VS Code, start a remote session on the server (which may require using a VPN for servers behind restrictive firewalls), start a Live Share session and finally distribute the links. Once the host disconnects the live session ends and the process need to be started from scratch. With the proposed headless Live Share server, you install it once on the remote machine, configure it and then run it. As long as the process keeps running users can connect to it.

[pixelblob]

I'm also looking for something along the lines of this, I can't really start vscode on my server and start a session because it's headless so some kind of launch argument would be very nice.

[derekbekoe]

For anyone still interested in this scenario, VS Code has announced The VS Code Server - https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2022/07/07/vscode-server