Support stable URLs for endpoints

[codemzy]

Hey gitpod team,

I'm on the premium plan and using one of my workspaces for development work on a repo. I've proxied a url e.g. dev.my-url.com to the url of the exposed port when I'm running the site so I can preview the work on my domain url (because some services I use the api keys are tied to the url) and also I can remember it then etc.

Anyway, this has been working fine, but today I opened the workspace and ran the site on the port, but it seems the workplace url has changed. Is this something that is expected? As in the same workspace may have a different url? I've not created a new workspace from the same repo or anything like that. I can reset up the proxy to the new url, but I would rather not have to keep doing this if it can be avoided. I expect to be working on this project for a few months.

Thanks 😄

[svenefftinge]

Workspace urls are not meant to be stable, as they depend on the cluster they are running in. You can always look up the URL by running

gp url <port>

Would it be possible to have your proxy accepting this information on some endpoint? That way you could update the proxy whenever you start a workspace and you could even easily start fresh workspaces on your repo all the time, which is how Gitpod is intended to be used.

[geropl]

Thanks @codemzy for sharing your usecase! I think this is an excellent point for adding a "URL" feature to Gitpod. 🙂

[devops-at-alinea]

I use Auth0 to handle logins. Authorized login urls need to be defined in my Auth0 dashboard or via an admin api.

Using the admin api just heaps extra complexity on my dev environment (and means I have to strip this code out in production) - the management of live and unused urls via the api would not be trivial either.

I've learned to double check my workspace url whenever I get a service error page from Auth0 now and update my live urls in Auth0 dashboard.

However I can see this issue become more critical as I use more 3rd party services with webhooks/authorized urls etc.

[codemzy]

Workspace urls are not meant to be stable, as they depend on the cluster they are running in. You can always look up the URL by running

gp url <port>

Would it be possible to have your proxy accepting this information on some endpoint? That way you could update the proxy whenever you start a workspace and you could even easily start fresh workspaces on your repo all the time, which is how Gitpod is intended to be used.

I don't think this would be possible, I set up the proxy from my netlify production deploy in the _redirects configuration, so while it is something I can easily update, I don't think it's something I could easily automate.

Maybe I'm not using gitpod how it was intended, by I usually need my dev environment for at least a few weeks at a time while I work on adding a feature or working on a new project, so it would really handy if each workspace could have a static url that doesn't change for the lifetime of the workspace. Especially useful when you have to authorise your api keys against a URL on other services you are using during development.

Please consider this! 🙏 🌟

[svenefftinge]

Please consider this! 🙏 🌟

Sure, we are thinking about a solution. Thank you for sharing your use cases.

[MeStrak]

I also have the same Auth0 challenge as @devops-at-alinea - a stable endpoint would be very helpful so I don't have to update the Auth0 dashboard all the time.

I think that wildcards can be specified for subdomains in the Auth0 dashboard, so it there was a way to have the project name in the subdomain it might solve the need.

For example:
https://xxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.myprojectidentifier.ws-eu03.gitpod.io/
OR with a hyphen
https://xxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-myprojectidentifier.ws-eu03.gitpod.io/

Where myprojectidentifier is some combination of project/username (would need some thinking about).

Within Auth0 I could allow the callback url https://*.myprojectidentifier.ws-eu03.gitpod.ioor https://*-myprojectidentifier.ws-eu03.gitpod.io respectively for the two cases above.

According to their docs I think that would work: https://auth0.com/docs/applications/wildcards-for-subdomains. As a guess maybe the hyphen option would be easier to implement because no additional sub domain level would be required?

[svenefftinge]

I have created an example for Auth0 https://github.com/gitpod-io/auth0-express-webapp-sample

[MeStrak]

Thanks @svenefftinge!

That's what I've done - the other suggestion was to be slightly more secure by limiting to the project identifier but actually it doesn't really matter for the dev environment anyway.

[leipert]

Another use case, @svenefftinge, at GitLab we want to use it to develop integrations with the Jira Cloud Platform. A changing URL means updating the URLs inside of Jira every time you restart a pod. The linking happens via an iframe.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.