Cache/store user preferences for JetBrains IDE's

[loujaybee]

It looks like on the surface that we need some solution similar to VSCode settings sync for JetBrains IDE's.

Creating this issue to add notes / investigation to.

Note: Given the discussion mentioned in Discourse. This could be potentially part of a wider solution about having persistence between workspaces.

Now of course if this was self hosted I could just mount the NFS drive to the pods or whatever myself, but it does defeat my plans of paying you guys money to do it for me. So I wonder if it would be possible to add “NFS Mounts” to the Gitpod yaml, and then have them added to the podspec when the container tries to come up so that Gitpod users have the ability to persist arbitrary data outside of Git.

Related issue in Discourse: https://community.gitpod.io/t/jetbrains-projector-mounting-nfs-drives/5599

Also see this discussion in Discord

[buggtb]

Well going off of the projector template: https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-jetbrains-intellij-idea

It says map in .jetbrains for versioning, but you really don't want to do that because it stores all sorts of binary crud in there, cache folders, java installs the works. Even on a project where I've basically just checked out some Scala stuff and downloaded the dependencies the folder is already around 1GB. Initially I did setup Git LFS and check the .jetbrains folder into that, but it became clear that wasn't really sustainable.

So I migrated my config off to an EC2 server, and used sshfs to mount the file system back into the pod, but I think the lag causes issues with the Projector rendering because it feels a bit sluggish and I think thats just the FS waiting for sync notifications and stuff. So I ditched sshfs and now have a whole rsync setup which keeps the remote and local in sync within a few seconds and when the workspace starts up syncs the config back to the workspace. These are stored by Git username -> Workspace name. So that if you get a fresh workspace the configs come with you.

It works, but its not the cleanest thing I've ever seen in my life :)

I was pondering the idea as mentioned above, in mounting my own NFS drive in, that was the first thing I tried. I can't be sure that the lag won't return, but even if it wasn't used for Intellij purposes, being able to mount an NFS mount into your workspace, that could provide additional data payloads, large storage etc would be cool, that way you could persist your stuff knowing it would come back next time the workspace started.

[loujaybee]

We need to learn a bit more here, and figure out if this relates to:

1. Caching of user settings
2. Caching of workspace values (e.g. prebuilds/incremental prebuilds)

I'm also marking as blocked, as we might be dependent on some other work @akosyakov are you able to link any related issues here?

[loujaybee]

May also be impacted by: #6740

[loujaybee]

Closing this now as spoke with @buggtb yesterday who is now using settings sync and native JetBrains features. Doesn't seem to be an immediate need for this issue right now, any remaining challenges look to be resolved by:

• Allow desktop IDE preferences (e.g. plugins) to be set via the .gitpod.yml #6706
• Gitpod "open in" should be set-able per project, not just per-user #6874

[loujaybee]

Also relevant / related issue on JetBrains side: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/CWM-4987