JetBrains Gateway in an air-gapped environment

In networks that restrict access to the internet, you will need to leverage the JetBrains Client Installer to download and save the IDE clients locally. Please see the JetBrains documentation for more information.

This page is an example that the Coder team used as a proof-of-concept (POC) of the JetBrains Gateway Offline Mode solution.

We used Ubuntu on a virtual machine to test the steps. If you have a suggestion or encounter an issue, please file a GitHub issue.

1. Deploy the server and install the Client Downloader

Install the JetBrains Client Downloader binary. Note that the server must be a Linux-based distribution:

wget https://download.jetbrains.com/idea/code-with-me/backend/jetbrains-clients-downloader-linux-x86_64-1867.tar.gz && \
tar -xzvf jetbrains-clients-downloader-linux-x86_64-1867.tar.gz

2. Install backends and clients

JetBrains Gateway requires both a backend to be installed on the remote host (your Coder workspace) and a client to be installed on your local machine. You can host both on the server in this example.

See here for the full JetBrains product list and builds. Below is the full list of supported --platforms-filter values:

windows-x64, windows-aarch64, linux-x64, linux-aarch64, osx-x64, osx-aarch64

To install both backends and clients, you will need to run two commands.

Backends

mkdir ~/backends
./jetbrains-clients-downloader-linux-x86_64-1867/bin/jetbrains-clients-downloader --products-filter <product-code> --build-filter <build-number> --platforms-filter linux-x64,windows-x64,osx-x64 --download-backends ~/backends

Clients

This is the same command as above, with the --download-backends flag removed.

mkdir ~/clients
./jetbrains-clients-downloader-linux-x86_64-1867/bin/jetbrains-clients-downloader --products-filter <product-code> --build-filter <build-number> --platforms-filter linux-x64,windows-x64,osx-x64 ~/clients

We now have both clients and backends installed.

3. Install a web server

You will need to run a web server in order to serve requests to the backend and client files. We installed nginx and setup an FQDN and routed all requests to /. See below:

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;

        root /var/www/html;

        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

        server_name _;

        location / {
                root /home/ubuntu;
        }
}

Then, configure your DNS entry to point to the IP address of the server. For the purposes of the POC, we did not configure TLS, although that is a supported option.

4. Add Client Files

You will need to add the following files on your local machine in order for Gateway to pull the backend and client from the server.

$ cat productsInfoUrl # a path to products.json that was generated by the backend's downloader (it could be http://, https://, or file://)

https://internal.site/backends/<PRODUCT_CODE>/products.json

$ cat clientDownloadUrl # a path for clients that you got from the clients' downloader (it could be http://, https://, or file://)

https://internal.site/clients/

$ cat jreDownloadUrl # a path for JBR that you got from the clients' downloader (it could be http://, https://, or file://)

https://internal.site/jre/

$ cat pgpPublicKeyUrl # a URL to the KEYS file that was downloaded with the clients builds.

https://internal.site/KEYS

The location of these files will depend upon your local operating system:

5. Setup SSH connection with JetBrains Gateway

With the server now configured, you can now configure your local machine to use Gateway. Here is the documentation to setup SSH config via the Coder CLI. On the Gateway side, follow our guide here until step 16.

Instead of downloading from jetbrains.com, we will point Gateway to our server endpoint. Select Installation options... and select Use download link. Note that the URL must explicitly reference the archive file:

Click Download IDE and Connect. Gateway should now download the backend and clients from the server into your remote workspace and local machine, respectively.

Next steps