Add menu items to start Ansible shell directly

[zikalino]

Currently I have to choose "Run playbook in..." to start SSH / Cloudshell / Docker Sometimes I would like to start for example SSH and start playing with Ansible with VSC without running playbook. Could we just have option "ansible: shell" ... and then choose available shell option to start one of preconfigured shells?

[yungez]

@zikalino the scenario seems ansible un-relevant operation, should be out-of-scope of this extension. but some more general extension for SSH. what's your usual way of SSH in vscode without this extension?

[zikalino]

well, i don't do SSH in vscode without this extension, i just start ssh in a separate window, but if i configure SSH in Ansible extension, then i will start using SSH here, as I don't want to have too many windows open.

In my case, I guess in 40% of cases i will be using SSH to run playbook and in 60% of cases i will do something else, for example:

• running ansible tests
• running playbook which is already on my VM machine
• doing other tasks related to Ansible

So I guess, normally i will just do following: (1) run some irrelevant playbook to start shell i need (2) start using that shell

so the purpose of this option is just to avoid doing this hack, and i think a lot of people will use it too.

[yungez]

@zikalino thanks for explaining the scenario clearly. for the 60% operation, I agree it's a real scenario, and lots of user will use ssh, to do things besides running ansible playbook, my question is that is not scope of this ansible extension. That ssh operation could be done easily even without vscode. Let's sync with our PM offline to discuss it.

[zikalino]

@formulahendry need your opinion, do you think such "additional" options may be useful to developers?