Add configuration to disallow IntelliJ in Self Hosted

[ChevronTango]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Due to certain policy constraints beyond our control, we cannot run IntelliJ in our company. We have been very impressed with Gitpod as a whole however. We'd like the ability to disable IntelliJ in the config so our users can continue to use the other IDEs such as VS Code.

Describe the behaviour you'd like

A flag in the helm chart which disables IntelliJ for users. It might also be worth including flags to disable the other IDEs

Describe alternatives you've considered

We thought about deliberately tweaking some of the IntelliJ config in the helm chart to break it, but this feels inelegant and prone to other errors.

Additional context

We currently have a couple small teams but this feature is a potential blocker to the entire company adopting Gitpod.

[csweichel]

/team workspace
/cc @metcalfc

[gtsiolis]

Since this is closely related to #2663, mostly related to self hosted, and eventually we'll most probably need to introduce more user control within the admin dashboard for features like this, we could add this as an admin dashboard feature where admin users have the option to enable or disable desktop IDEs for all users in a Gitpod instance.

[csweichel]

/team meta

[svenefftinge]

@ChevronTango Could you give a little more context on the kind of policy you have? I want to better understand those constraints to see if there is an alternative approach to disabling.

[ChevronTango]

@ChevronTango Could you give a little more context on the kind of policy you have? I want to better understand those constraints to see if there is an alternative approach to disabling.

The policy is that no IntelliJ/Jetbrains products can be installed on any machine or used by any engineer for developing our products.

I'm not privy to more than that. I'm just trying to deliver services like gitpod and this is a restriction we're just having to work around. Right now we're worried we'll be stuck being unable to upgrade our Gitpod instance beyond 0.10.0

[loujaybee]

I think that before we can implement a wrapper for JetBrains, we need some implementation Gitpod wide, to enable this type of feature toggling. We could implement some tactical/cheap solution, but ideally we integrate with a more well thought out global feature for this. I think this is something that needs significant input more from the self-hosting side than from an IDE / Meta side. CC: @mrsimonemms / @metcalfc

[mrsimonemms]

cc @corneliusludmann

[akosyakov]

@ChevronTango Is it security concern? You probably would like to disable SSH access to workspaces as well?

[ChevronTango]

That is also something we would like the ability to control, though we could in theory do some mitigation of that already with network policies.

[lucasvaltl]

Triaged this. This is a worthwhile feature on which we should gather more signal, but it is not likely to be worked on soon. Potentially a feature for the admin page.

[lucasvaltl]

On second thought, it would be better to add this as a configuration on a team level and thus also make this an option for gitpod.io (also discussed internally). As such, removing team Self-Hosted.

[geropl]

I can certainly see the value in having such a config. And it might make sense to start out with having in on team level.
Still, I wonder how this might actually look like, and how's responsible for maintaining those, and feel we might at least have a short discussion about this. /cc @jldec

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.