When I stop working on a CodeRoad tutorial part way through, I can re-open the Codespaces instance at any time from Github. They’re unhelpfully named, but that’s no great problem:
I can get back in, my extensions are still installed, and my files are still in place. All good so far.
However, to get guidance and run the checks that will eventually lead to completing the assignment I need to get CodeRoad running again. So I hit F1 and open it from the Command panel.
CodeRoad is running now, but doesn’t know what tutorial I’m doing. No problem there - the obvious solution is just to take the Course URL from the fCC course page and re-enter it.
But, “Oops!” It’s an error message - and not a helpful one. The workspace (which I’m taking to mean folder here, since that’s the way I’ve seen the term used before) obviously isn’t empty, because it has both my work and the original course files in it too. “Check Again” just shows the same screen; I also tried making a new empty folder (workspace/empty) and opening it as a workspace. This restarts the session in the new folder, and we can start the first step, but…
We can check in the terminal, but it seems like we do have git installed:
camper: /camper$ git version
git version 2.25.1
And in fact the error tells us it’s something to do with permissions, rather than Git’s availability. As there’s no obvious idea of what to do next (and because we don’t have any of our files here anyway), I interpreted this as a dead end. We can navigate back out of the directory (and delete it with sudo), but we’re not any closer to solving the issue.
Interestingly, though, if we then cd into workspace or workspace/project we can see the tutorial again! But it still doesn’t work. Also, VSCode thinks we’re still in empty, which causes problems try to start a new terminal session.
For lack of any better idea I reopen project in VSCode and start a new terminal. I try to open CodeRoad, and…
We’re back to square one.
None of the suggested documentation for fCC + CodeRoad explains what to do in or event mentions this situation. The lab page tells me to go to the fCC rdb-alpha github page to re-open a repository.
The repo README explains how to run a project from scratch, and how to restart or switch a project, but none of these are what we want to do. In any case, if I want to restart or switch a project I can just make a new CodeSpace, which is what happens automatically when I hit “Start the project” on a lab/certification project/workshop.
If we follow the instructions in the “Restart project” section to run Dev Containers: Rebuild Container, we can wipe out all our progress and the course files. If we restart Code Road now we can start a new tutorial… but what’s the point?
I don’t know how common the issues I’m having are. On the CodeRoad repo some others are having similar problems: 1 2. Likewise here on the forums: 1.
I don’t know if I’m doing something heroically stupid here, or what level of troubleshoot it’s reasonable to try and take on myself. But at the very least it happens to me a lot, and I’m surprised this isn’t in the guide or any of the info on using Codespaces on the individual course pages. But I’d really appreciate some help. A lot of the RDB workshops take me 3-4 hours, and it’s difficult to find the time to get them done in one sitting. It’s tough to find the motivation to even start one when I know there’s a risk I’ll lose my work. I guess I could copy-paste out my files every time I pause, but that’s a hacky solution and wouldn’t solve the problem with the workshops (which although they may not be mandatory to complete the course, do cover material that isn’t currently touched by theory sessions.
So, sorry for the wall of text, but I wanted to be thorough. What am I doing wrong, what’s expected behaviour for Code Road, and what isn’t? And can this information be made more available. I know everyone here’s a volunteer, I don’t want to be entitled, but I assume if I’m having this problem then so are others, and I want my contribution to solving it to be as I say thorough.
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