suppress exposing some ports

Question

suppress exposing some ports

akosyakov opened this issue 5 years ago · comments

During Node.js debugging I see notifications to expose ports, it gets annoying. It would be nice if it is possible to mark some ports like not exposable and suppress new notifications.

Sven Efftinge · Answer 1 · Thu Jan 17 2019 21:25:04 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

In the .gitpod.yml you can say

 - port: 43534 
   onOpen: ignore

Josh LeBlanc · Answer 2 · Tue Apr 09 2019 18:48:56 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Is it possible to do that globally?

using meteor, you end up with this:

Uses a new port every time the hot-reloader runs.

Jan Keromnes · Answer 3 · Tue Apr 09 2019 18:55:34 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@HorizonShadow Oof, that's a lot of ports!

If you know these ports in advance, you can silence the pop-ups with something like this in your .gitpod.yml:

ports:
  - port: 3001
    onOpen: ignore
  - port: 29851
    onOpen: ignore
  - port: 28593
    onOpen: ignore
  - port: 21581
    onOpen: ignore

EDIT: (I should have read prior comments before replying.) I don't think we have a way to ignore port ranges yet, unfortunately. 😕 Would be a useful feature for meteor though!

EDIT 2: Something like this maybe:

ports:
  - port: 20000-30000
    onOpen: ignore

Moritz Eysholdt · Answer 4 · Mon Apr 15 2019 15:16:08 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I was also made aware of a project where programs open many ports, leading to several popup messages in Gitpod:

The intention I would like to express is: "I have listed all relevant ports of my project, I don't care about the rest, I can't predict what other ports will be opened because programs choose random ports numbers and I don't want to bother investigating based on which strategy they do that".

I thought we could have something like.

ports:
  - port: 20000
    onOpen: open-preview
  - ignoreAllOtherPorts: true

or even better, define the semantics of @jankeromnes suggestion to be like this:

ports:
  - port: 20000
    onOpen: open-preview
  - port: 1000-30000
    onOpen: ignore

This would ignore ports 1000-30000, except the ones that have been explicitly opened (20000).

Jan Keromnes · Answer 5 · Mon Apr 15 2019 16:37:12 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Another idea could be to throttle the Gitpod port pop-ups, only opening the first 2 or 3, and then say something like:

There are 12 other ports with activity [View active ports] [Ignore all unspecified ports]

?

EDIT: This would have the benefit of working just fine, even if you don't know / care about .gitpod.yml.

Alex Tugarev · Answer 6 · Mon Apr 15 2019 16:48:29 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

In addition to that, I propose to introduce a user setting for ignoring port notifications.

Moritz Eysholdt · Answer 7 · Mon Apr 15 2019 17:14:29 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Some people want to use Gitpod to demo their code:

the person that prepares the demo has deep knowledge about .gitpod.yml
the person that views the demo should not have a single false-positive popup.

Anton Kosyakov · Answer 8 · Thu Apr 18 2019 00:52:55 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I have same issues with node debugging on random ports. I cannot specify which port can be ignored, one notification is not so annoying, but still distracting.

Sven Efftinge · Answer 9 · Thu Apr 18 2019 16:14:35 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Lot's of good suggestions!
I like the simplicty of ignoreAllOtherPorts but would like to make it fit better with the existing concepts by allowing ranges and a wildcard * in addition to the port numbers.

Example:

ports:
 - port: 3000
   onOpen: open-preview
 - port: *
   onOpen: ignore

One could argue that the current default is.

ports:
 - port: *
   onOpen: notify

I also think #493 would improve the UX a lot.

Improving notifications generally makes a lot of sense, too. We should generalize that in Theia.

Ugo Pattacini · Answer 10 · Thu Apr 18 2019 19:19:17 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I would really love to have the possibility to mask notifications for port ranges or even better for all those ports in .gitpod.yml that I don't specifically mark as to-be-notified.

When I start my application in Gitpod, the IDE is literally flooded with tons of notifications.

Sven Efftinge · Answer 11 · Thu Apr 18 2019 20:53:01 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

We should maybe add onOpen: ignore-no-expose to allow non auto-exposing for ranges.

Jan Keromnes · Answer 12 · Fri Apr 19 2019 20:35:38 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'd like to implement port ranges like so (implicit priority: "single port" > "specific port ranges" > "*"):

ports:
- port: 3000
  onOpen: open-preview
- port: 3001-4000
  onOpen: notify
- port: *
  onOpen: ignore

However, my concern is that until now, every port listed in ports: gets exposed in the workspace (whether onOpen: is open-browser, open-preview, notify or ignore).

But when you do:

- port: *
  onOpen: ignore

I guess your intent is not to suddenly expose all the ports of your workspace, but just to silence the notifications.

Thus, I would like to:

rename ignore to expose (same behavior: expose the port silently and do nothing else)
add a new action that is both silent and doesn't expose the port, called something like block or ignore-no-expose as suggested above

We could keep backwards compatibility by continuing to allow ignore as a synonym for expose.

(EDIT: Maybe renaming ignore to expose is optional. It seems it's already used quite a lot.)

Jan Keromnes · Answer 13 · Sat Apr 20 2019 01:22:29 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Actually (after many design iterations) I think that the following behavior would be best to silence noisy port notifications, without unintended side-effects, nor over-complicated configurations:

Port ranges in .gitpod.yml don't pre-expose ports
When a port from a range becomes active and the IDE opens it, it gets automatically exposed first
(no change to the existing onOpen actions)

Current behavior (to illustrate):

ports:
- port: 3000 # exposed
- port: 3001
  onOpen: open-preview # exposed
- port: 3002
  onOpen: notify # exposed
- port: 3003
  onOpen: ignore # exposed

New with port ranges:

ports:
- port: 4000-4999 # (same as notify)
- port: 5000-5999
  onOpen: open-preview # not exposed (but a port that triggers a preview will get exposed first)
- port: 6000-6999
  onOpen: notify # not exposed (but clicking on "Open Preview" or "Open Browser" will expose that port)
- port: *
  onOpen: ignore # not exposed (if you really want to expose a port here, either configure it specifically, or manually expose from the Ports view)

Sven Efftinge · Answer 14 · Sat Apr 20 2019 04:51:11 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I often use ignore and need that port being exposed. This is always the case for any API endpoints.

Would be good to auto-expose on ignore, open-browser, open-preview.
But not on notify (default) and a new ignore-no-expose.

The notify will open up a notification allowing to open in browser or open in preview which will auto-expose.

Moritz Eysholdt · Answer 15 · Mon Apr 22 2019 15:49:15 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Hi @jankeromnes, thank you for your proposal!

I also think (like @svenefftinge) that we should support the use-case of exposing ports without raising notifications for them.

Besides this, I think I understand how @svenefftinge and you arrive at different approaches. @svenefftinge's design has two assumptions:

listing a port in .gitpod.yml means it is exposed.
onOpen is only about the action that's triggered when an app starts listening on that port, not exposure.

If a user is not aware of these two assumptions he/she is very like to misunderstand the semantic's of ignore: He/she may think the port is ignored by Gitpod: not exposed, no notification.

Jan Keromnes · Answer 16 · Tue Apr 23 2019 16:45:39 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Thank you for the quick feedback on my proposal!

I agree with:

making Open Browser and Open Preview actions expose the port on-the-fly if necessary
changing onOpen: notify to not pre-expose the port

I often use ignore and need that port being exposed. This is always the case for any API endpoints.

My gut feeling here is that you'll never want to use public Gitpod URLs like https://31457-abcd.ws-eu.gitpod.io when using port ranges.

I think that you'll either have:

A single API port (or just a few), that you can list individually in .gitpod.yml
Too many API ports, that you'll be able to list as a port range like - port: 30000-40000, but that you won't ever use public Gitpod URLs for (e.g. unexposed localhost:31457 access server-side will be enough)

Because of 1. and 2., I'm suggesting to continue pre-exposing single ports (e.g. - port: 8081, regardless of onOpen) but to not pre-expose port ranges (e.g. - port: 30000-40000). Do you think that's reasonable?

Another way to put my question is, what do you think should happen when users do:

- port: *
  onOpen: ignore

?

Jan Keromnes · Answer 17 · Tue Apr 23 2019 17:14:13 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

(Side-note, we can't use the syntax - port: *, as our parser thinks * is an empty YAML alias. Instead, it should be - port: "*", or just - default:.)

Jan Keromnes · Answer 18 · Mon May 06 2019 21:16:22 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Update: I'm currently implementing something like this:

ports:
  - port: 3000-3999
    onOpen: ignore

The Good: By default, this will have the desired effect of silencing the notifications of all ports in the specified range (because of onOpen: ignore).

The Bad: This will also have the unfortunate side-effect of automatically exposing all active ports in that range (i.e. just like automatically clicking "Expose" on all these notifications, regardless of onOpen).

In the interest of time, I'll ship this version first, and follow up with improvements later. (Also, I don't like the name ignore-no-expose, but if that's the preferred way to silence notifications without exposing all ports, I'll implement it.)

Ugo Pattacini · Answer 19 · Mon May 06 2019 22:13:29 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Thank you @jankeromnes for being on this.
Having ignore-no-expose (or any equivalent tag) available would be great in my setting.

Jan Keromnes · Answer 20 · Tue May 07 2019 23:07:04 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Update: Port ranges are now implemented and should be deployed very soon (today). 🎉

Additionally, contrary to the previous update, port ranges with onOpen: ignore will not be automatically exposed for now (i.e. for port ranges, ignore currently behaves like a ignore-no-expose would):

ports:
  - port: 2000-2999
    onOpen: open-preview # auto-exposed
  - port: 3000-3999
    onOpen: ignore # NOT auto-exposed

This is slightly inconsistent with individual ports, in order to preserve backward-compatibility:

ports:
  - port: 4000
    onOpen: open-preview # auto-exposed
  - port: 5000
    onOpen: ignore # also auto-exposed

I also think that it makes sense that way:

If you have a single ignored port, it might be a backend that you'd like to access via a Gitpod preview URL like https://5000-abcd.ws-eu.gitpod.io
But if it's an entire port range that's ignored, you're probably not going to bother with preview URLs (i.e. you just want to silence them, or you just want to use localhost:<dynamic port> server-side). And even if you really want a preview URL, you can always manually expose ports from the Open Ports view, or set the range's onOpen to something different than ignore.

Note that this is very easy to tweak further in the future. Please let me know if you'd like the auto-exposing behavior to be changed.

Jan Keromnes · Answer 21 · Wed May 08 2019 00:11:33 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Final update: Port ranges are now live on gitpod.io! Please try them out and report any bugs. 😊

EDIT: For example,

here is a test repository with pre-configured port ranges
you can try to open any port in a range by running python3 -m http.server 3500 in the terminal

Ugo Pattacini · Answer 22 · Wed May 08 2019 03:50:41 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Working gracefully!
Thanks a lot for this nice addition 🚀