Eclipse Open Collaboration Tools (OCT) Module

[bpmct]

Summary

Deploy a standalone, externally-hosted OCT server, authenticate it against Coder's (experimental) OAuth2 provider using OCT's generic-OAuth env vars, and figure out how to auto-start/join a session per-workspace.

Part 1: Deploy OCT server (outside Coder)

Run the official oct-server-dev container as its own long-lived service — not spun up per workspace, since it's single-instance/in-memory.

Part 2: Coder OAuth setup

1. Enable Coder's OAuth2 provider: coder server --experiments oauth2 (or CODER_EXPERIMENTS=oauth2). Note: experimental/unstable per Coder's own docs — fine for a dev-rel internal tool, not something to depend on for anything critical yet.
2. Register OCT as an app: POST $CODER_URL/api/v2/oauth2-provider/apps with a name + callback URL, then generate a client secret via POST .../apps/$APP_ID/secrets.
3. Configure the OCT server with generic-OAuth env vars:
   • OCT_OAUTH_CLIENTID / OCT_OAUTH_CLIENTSECRET — from step 2
   • OCT_OAUTH_URL — your Coder base URL
   • OCT_OAUTH_TOKEN_URL — $CODER_URL/oauth2/tokens
   • OCT_OAUTH_USERINFO_URL — $CODER_URL/api/v2/users/me
   • OCT_OAUTH_USERNAMECLAIM / OCT_OAUTH_EMAILCLAIM — map to whatever fields Coder's /users/me response actually returns (needs checking against the real payload)
   • OCT_OAUTH_CLIENTLABEL — e.g. "Coder"
4. Spike before committing: confirm OCT's code-flow client actually sends code_challenge/PKCE — Coder will hard-reject the authorization request otherwise. If it doesn't, this may need a small patch upstream to OCT or a wrapper proxy in front of Coder's OAuth endpoint.

Part 3: Auto-starting a session — still open

No documented headless/CLI session API. Before building a Coder module around this, check whether the extension exposes scriptable VS Code commands, or whether there's a lower-level session API in the client packages. If neither exists, may be worth a feature request upstream.

Known non-goals (confirmed limitations)

• No terminal/port sharing — blocked by a still-proposed VS Code API, no OCT workaround exists.
• No plan to reverse-engineer Live Share — its relay protocol is proprietary and closed-source; not a realistic path.

References

• OCT server generic OAuth config: (server package README)
• Coder OAuth2 provider docs: https://coder.com/docs/admin/integrations/oauth2-provider
• Terminal sharing status: eclipse-oct/open-collaboration-tools issue
• Initial exploration in community office hours

[linear-code]

ENG-3104

[Edd88-pixel]

hey , Quick update on how I’m planning to approach this.
Before changing the Coder integration, I think the missing capabilities should be added to OCT itself:
optional S256 PKCE support for the generic OAuth provider

I’m going to work on these as two small, separate OCT contributions first. Once they are accepted and available in an OCT release, I’ll come back here and finish the Coder integration using those supported APIs.
This keeps the Coder-side change small and avoids carrying OCT-specific patches

what do you think because no matter how much I look, it's the right method that I think is good