GIT authentication in rstudio-server not working

[behrica]

I am using the rstudio feature

"ghcr.io/rocker-org/devcontainer-features/rstudio-server": {}

But I am unable to get github authentication working when using the rstudio GIT ui.
It always fails with "authentication required"
I tried all possible ways including environment vars or git helpers , but nothing worked.

Is somebody aware of instructions for a "working authentication" of the rstudio-sever devcontainer feature with GitHub.

(Git in VSCode is fully functional)

With quite some "magic" I got git push/pull working in the rstudio Terminal, but not in the UI, including setting of env vars.

The most concrete issue was, that I could not configure the rserver process with environment vars in
"/etc/rstudio/env-vars". I this a known issue ?

[eitsupi]

From what tool do you use the Feature?
What does the git config look like?

If you are using VS Code Devcontainers, this issue may be related r-lib/pak#633.

[behrica]

I use Codespaces and, the devcontaioner.json is this:

{
	"name": "R (rocker/r-ver base)",
	"image": "ghcr.io/rocker-org/devcontainer/r-ver:4.4",
	"features": {
		"ghcr.io/rocker-org/devcontainer-features/pandoc:1": {},
		"ghcr.io/rocker-org/devcontainer-features/r-packages:1": {
			"packages": "rmarkdown,devtools,tidyverse,r-lib/xml2,jsonlite,httr2",
			 "additionalRepositories": "CRAN = 'https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/2024-06-10'"
		},
		"ghcr.io/rocker-org/devcontainer-features/rstudio-server": {}
	},
	"postAttachCommand": {
        "rstudio-start": "rserver"
    },
    "forwardPorts": [
        8787
    ],
    "portsAttributes": {
        "8787": {
            "label": "RStudio IDE"
        }
	},

   "remoteEnv":{
       //not working
	"GCM_CREDENTIAL_STORE": "cache"
   }
   
}

[behrica]

The "high level description of the issue" could as well be expressed as:

The rstudio instances started by the rstudio-feature ""ghcr.io/rocker-org/devcontainer-features/rstudio-server" does not inherit the correctly setup GIT authentication configuration from Codespaces.
Additionally I could not find documentation anywhere about this.

[behrica]

The "root cause" of the issues likes in the fact that when using the rstudio server together with codespaces, the source code will not be cloned by rstudio . As it is cloned already by Codespaces, which configures certain GIT authentication methods-
So when using rstudio a ".git" folder is alreday present. And I did not find a way to "tell rstudio" how to authenticate the existing and gloned repo. It does not "detect" the VSCode GIT setup or similar

[behrica]

I found a workaround, namely to "change" the remote url, so replacing an url like:
https://github.com/my-project

via

git remote set-url origin xxxx@https://github.com/my-project

where xxx is a github token.
After doing this, the GIT features of rstudio seems to work, but it lost the "tracking remote", so needed to set this by hand as well.

[eitsupi]

The rstudio instances started by the rstudio-feature ""ghcr.io/rocker-org/devcontainer-features/rstudio-server" does not inherit the correctly setup GIT authentication configuration from Codespaces.

I believe RStudio Server is intentionally designed not to read environment variables. For example, if you search the internet you will find the following post:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16867720/rstudio-server-environment-variables-not-loading

I guess what we could do here is use a lifecycle script to write the environment variables to something like Renviron before RStudio Server starts, does that make sense?
Pull Requests are welcome!

[behrica]

Renviron would not work I believe, as this sets it for the "rsession".
But the rstudio GIT UI tools are part of "rserver" itself, not the rsession.
I tried to set manual env-vars as documented here:
https://docs.posit.co/ide/server-pro/1.4.1722-1/server-management.html chapter 2.1.4,
but this did not have any visible effect to me.

[eitsupi]

Could you ask about the RStudio IDE in the upstream?
I believe we just have a standard setup here.