Make Terraform extension available in "browser mode"

[radeksimko]

Problem Statement

GitHub employees and other users use VS Code in the browser for various reasons. This extension currently isn't available for them.

Example https://github.dev/hashicorp/terraform-guides

Expected User Experience

Extension is available to assist users in editing Terraform code in their browser, the same way as in desktop VS Code.

For example at https://vscode.dev/ or https://github.dev/

Proposal

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/codespaces#_why-is-an-extension-not-installable-in-the-browser

There is some documentation here: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/web-extensions

We could initially provide just a minimal extension for the web - e.g. with syntax highlighting only.

• [ ] Investigate impact on telemetry logic
• [ ] Investigate replacing of esbuild with webpack
• [ ] Create browser entrypoint and link it from package.json per docs, e.g. "browser": "./dist/web/extension.js",

Longer-term we'd need to find out if there's any way or benefit from running LS in the browser - either via WASM or GopherJS.

[andymac4182]

This would be awesome! I have been doing lots of PR reviews in the browser with github.dev

[Satak]

Please make this available for github codespaces.

[jpogran]

Hey @Satak, apologies for the delay in response. You should be able to use the extension in Codespaces:

Intellisense and other advanced language features work:

[Satak]

@jpogran But it is not available for Codespaces in web browser:

[jpogran]

Yep! I misunderstood what you were referring to because the two are called different things: https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/the-githubdev-web-based-editor

We currently work in the full Codespaces environment. We don't yet work in the web-based editor.

[jpogran]

I am exceedingly happy to announce, that as of v2.25.0, we now work in github.dev and vscode.dev in the browser!

[radeksimko]

As mentioned, we provide a basic web version of the extension from v2.25.0, therefore I am going to close this issue. I have however created a separate one in https://github.com/hashicorp/vscode-terraform/issues/1287 to track possible future enhancements in this area. Comments are welcomed there.

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