Support for offline installation

[vtcifer]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Currently when installing RCC plugin for vscode, it tries to download additional dependencies from the internet. When you attempt to install in an isolated environment, this fails.

Describe the solution you'd like Provide support for offline extension installation where all dependencies are bundled with the extension.

Describe alternatives you've considered There are no alternatives - internet access is not available in our environment,

[kariharju]

Hi @vtcifer,

This is a challenge and getting this built-in just in the extension is somewhat impossible as the extension does not what dependencies your robots need. We have not tested this and do not officially support as this does restrict the usage by a lot, by I think this should still be technically possible with some extra manual steps RCC supports pre-built environments that can be moved as zip files between machines.

So the steps needed could be something like:

1. Pre-build the environments your robots need on machines that have internet access
2. Pre-build the environment required by the extension (platform-specific YAML files here)
3. Export the environments > zip file > validate with any tools you see fit > import to the isolated machine
4. Probably in this case you'd also need to create a portable VS Code setup so that even the extensions just come as files.

[fabioz]

As a note, VSCode now supports platform-specific extensions, so, we can at least think about shipping rcc with the extension instead of downloading it separately when the extension is started.

See: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/working-with-extensions/publishing-extension#platformspecific-extensions

[kariharju]

This issue has been moved here, under Sema4AI/vscode-extension repository.