Proposal: vscode-web feature (Microsoft's official VS Code web server)

[schnell3526]

Motivation

The code-server feature in this repo is great for putting VS Code in the browser of a dev container, but code-server cannot use the Microsoft Marketplace, so Microsoft-exclusive extensions such as Pylance and GitHub Copilot are unavailable.

For Terraform-managed workspaces Coder already ships the vscode-web module, which runs Microsoft's official VS Code web server (vscode-server-linux-*-web, the build behind code serve-web). There is no dev container feature equivalent, so teams whose workspaces standardize on VS Code Web currently have to hand-roll postStartCommand scripts in every repository to get the same editor inside dev containers (Coder Tasks / dev container sub-agents).

I'd like to propose adding a vscode-web feature to this collection, side by side with code-server.

What the feature does

Modeled closely on the existing code-server feature:

• install.sh downloads the official web server build at image build time (latest stable by default, pinnable via a version option) and installs extensions as the remote user
• an entrypoint script starts serve-local on container start (default 127.0.0.1:13338, matching the registry module)
• a customizations.coder.apps entry surfaces it on the Coder dashboard, same as the code-server feature
• options mirror the server's CLI surface: port, host, connectionTokenFile, serverBasePath, serverDataDir, userDataDir, extensionsDir, extensions, defaultFolder, telemetryLevel, logLevel, logFile, disableWorkspaceTrust, plus the app* options

Two design points worth calling out:

1. License: the Microsoft VS Code Server license must be accepted (--accept-server-license-terms). Rather than accepting it implicitly, the feature requires an explicit acceptLicenseTerms: true option and fails the build with a clear error otherwise — the ACCEPT_EULA pattern from Microsoft's own container images.
2. Health check: the standalone web server exposes no /healthz endpoint (it returns 404; /version returns 200), so the feature's Coder app health check probes /version. Note this also affects the registry vscode-web module, whose coder_app healthcheck points at /healthz today.

Reference implementation

A working implementation, including scenario tests (defaults, debian base image, custom port/host, extensions, pinned version, default folder, log level — all passing locally on the devcontainer CLI), is here:

main...schnell3526:devcontainer-features:feat/vscode-web

Happy to open a PR if this is something you'd take.

[DanielleMaywood]

Thank you for the write-up and feature-request (with a possible implementation). I'll discuss internally if we feel this is something we want to maintain 😄