GH Auth inside of a devcontainer

[reflash]

Hi!

I'm trying to run gh cli inside of VS Code devcontainer. Unfortunately it demands me to authenticate every time I rebuild the container. Is there any way to make this work ? Maybe I can copy some of credentials from my source system?

[mislav]

If you can set environment variables globally in your container, you can set GH_TOKEN with the value of your OAuth token or Personal Access Token for GitHub, and gh will use that.

Alternatively, you may copy your ~/.config/gh/hosts.yml file from a computer where you've completed the gh auth login process into your dev container.

[mislav]

@SmallRoomLabs It depends on what the contents of the container is. Setting environment variables globally can be done via shell initialization files such as /etc/profile or other. Environment variables can also be set by the script that spins up/logs into the devcontainer. Finally, you can avoid having to set GH_TOKEN or GITHUB_TOKEN within the devcontainer by doing gh auth login -h github.com --with-token during devcontainer provisioning and piping the token in via standard input.

[mengstr]

Ah, I was using the word "devcontainer" not so much in its generic sense but rather in the term used by Visual Codes Remote Containers extension So the container is spun up automatically by VC and I don't find any relevant settings in VC to pipe/send/set data into the container.

The current project is private, and if I was the only one working on it it would be easy to just add the data/token in the Dockerfile and/or devcontainer.json. But here there are additional people and

By obvious reasons I don't want to have my personal token available in the repo. If it was possible to use a repo-specific token it would be ok to have it set inside there since anyone with access to the repo already have access. ;-)

But I now realized 🤦🏼 that I already have a local volume that connects to the container for persisting, among other things, the bash history. I could just have a copy of hosts.yml there and utilize that. That's probably the easiest way of tackling this - except for possibly "it just works out of the box" as the forwarding of my git credentials into local and remote/ssh containers works.

Hopefully Codespaces goes GA soon (or that I'll get a beta invite :hint: :nudge: : wink: )

[3f6a]

Would be nice if this was automatically done by devcontainers/features/github-cli (with some setting). I mean, it could exploit the fact that I am already authenticated on gh on my local machine, to create a new token for the container? And do that all by itself.

[3f6a]

... by doing gh auth login -h github.com --with-token during devcontainer provisioning and piping the token in via standard input

@mislav Could you please post a full example of how this would work? In particular the "piping the token in via standard input
" bit. Thank you!

[3f6a]

Related: #7611 (though also no answer there)