feature: persistent home dir/ dotfiles/ env in OSS

[wey-gu]

As titled, it's like the GCP cloud shell😋 in a multi cloud/ self managed way 😜.

Does this make sense to you?

Thanks!

[laixintao]

Thanks! @wey-gu it's a good idea!

DigitalOcean's API support user_data when creating a new Droplet.

https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/api-reference/#operation/create_droplet

A string containing 'user data' which may be used to configure the Droplet on first boot, often a 'cloud-config' file or Bash script. It must be plain text and may not exceed 64 KiB in size.

I am thinking about making it a common config for all providers, if providers support something like user_data then we use this feature to provision. If not, maybe manually ssh to server then run the custom command before user login. (Though users may need to wait longer XD)

[wey-gu]

Wow! Amazing!

This (with optionally persistent home state/env) will boost my workflow(including from phone/ iPad) in next level!

Thanks!

[junaire]

I think we can also implement synchronous shell history.

We can backup the shell history to the server that lobbyboy located when we exit the remote vm, and recover it when we create a new one.

As for the persistent dotfiles, I think we can provide an option, letting users execute their shell script when creating a new vm, then we can deploy our dotfiles. With this, we can even mount external storage like gdrive to have persistent directory!