[Feature Request] Shared persistent mountpoints / volumes

[peterkracik]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

For certain types of projects (mostly CMS - WordPress, typo3, sulu... but not only) would be less hustle to have one central database and one central asset storage, instead of recreating the database and copying assets for each new workspace.
and thus having persistent storage - a volume, which could be mounted to a workspace, or even shared within the team, would be helpful.
As a concrete example: if I want to work on a new Github issue, I don't want a clean database, I would prefer to have the same DB content and also assets in the uploads folder, as on the master workspace. So this way I would just select the desired volume and mount it to my issue workspace.

Describe the behaviour you'd like

Similar behaviour as Docker volume or Kubernetes PVC - a possibility to create persistent volumes, which could be then mounted to any workspace or duplicated and then mounted, to the defined path. It could be defined within the .gitpod.yml.

Describe alternatives you've considered

At the moment I use an external database server and manually copy assets to the workspace

[konne]

First I really like the idea of the possibility to have shared mounted folders.
@peterkracik you can now archive this already a little bit with the multip repo feature. So you can have one repo that contains your DB and you just also check it out, or you can even just have a shared folder that you mount from an external S3, FTP,... for the drivers you just need to extend the base image.

Second point, if you share a volume across different workspace it getting always complex in situations with multiple persons have access at the same time to the same volume, so you are very fast loosing consistency

[csweichel]

Gitpod workspaces support fuse out of the box. You can use that to mount e.g. S3 buckets, SSH or NFS (did not test the latter)

[atduarte]

Thanks for the suggestion @peterkracik!

Another alternative is to host the database separately and use something like tailscale to be able to access it from your workspaces.

As @konne mentioned, it can be quite complex and weird in situations with multiple people accessing the same volume at the same time.

[scasei]

/dev/fuse: Operation not permitted,
mount.nfs: Network is unreachable

What should I do?

[loujaybee]

Possibly also related to:

• Is there any way to persist the home directory? #340