Authentication for Gitlens paid feature in secured computer environment disconnected from the Internet

[tonyctan]

My research must be conducted in a secured computer environment that is disconnected from the Internet. Can Gitlens be authenticated offline in order to turn on paid features such as visual file history? Many thanks.

[eamodio]

Unfortunately, unless you can be online to complete the inital authentication process, there isn't a current way to support this scenario. We will add this request to our backlog to investigate how we can support this in the future. Thanks!

[noam-isaac]

Feature is definitely needed, many jobs require security levels which simply don't allow direct access to the web at work stations!

[recursivenomad]

Also voicing support for offline access to free GitLens+ features! It is unexpected to have access to features while developing a repository locally, only for those features to be taken away when a remote is added without internet access.

[eamodio]

@recursivenomad As long as you can at some point let GitLens determine if the remote is accessible (e.g. public) it will get remembered for a while to work in the offline case.

[recursivenomad]

Thanks for your response @eamodio - That is my current approach, however this validation is the only piece of my VSCode installation which requires internet access, and I would look forward to a way to keep VSCode disconnected completely. I appreciate that your monetization model allows for free users to access these very useful features in the first place, but perhaps there is an offline/manual way of validating the public nature of a repository?

If ideas would be helpful here, offering/documenting the ability to validate the repo periodically through VSCode on a separate machine and transfer a file containing said validation to the offline installation could be a workaround, albeit cumbersome. Alternatively, providing a web page which verifies if a repo URL is public and returns a unique code users can manually input into their offline GitLens extension would be very accessible, only requiring accessing the internet from any internet-capable device and not specifically another computer running VSCode.

Thank you for your work on this project! 🙂

[ThalusA]

Hi, is it possible to have any update on this issue ? I'm working in a closed environment disconnected from the internet and when I install GitLens manually I get "This GitLens pre-release version (2023.9.2905) has expired. Please upgrade to a more recent version.". So even the free features doesn't work when fully offline at all point.

[eamodio]

@ThalusA Switch back to use the released version of GitLens rather than the pre-release version, since only pre-releases expire (since it is a nightly build)