Opening files from the terminal in BAS dev spaces

[qmacro]

In the comments to episode 4 of our back to basics series of live stream episodes on CAP, on the Hands-on SAP Dev show, there was a question on my use of code in VS Code, which, when invoked in the terminal (e.g. code services.cds) opens the file directly in a VS Code editor window, like this:

The question was about code being recognised in SAP Business Application Studio (BAS) dev spaces.

Basically, while code is not a command that's available in dev spaces, there's a BAS-specific command basctl which has a couple of options, one of which is --open. Here are some examples, taken from the usage text:

Examples
  $ basctl --open http://sap.com
  $ basctl --open http://localhost:8082/tmp
  $ basctl --open file:///home/user/projects/proj1/myfile.txt
  $ basctl --open /myfile.txt
  $ basctl --open ./myfolder/myfile.txt

So while there isn't a code command, you can use basctl --open to get something similar. I say similar, because for some reason I cannot yet fathom (my small brain, again) it opens the file in a new column. Anyway, here's what it looks like in action:

(I've asked internally about this behaviour, and will update this blog post with anything I find out.)

The nice thing about what basctl offers perhaps is the ability to invoke framework commands, via an additional --command option, like this: basctl --command workbench.action.openSettings.

The question also asked about my use of tree, and noted its lack of availability in BAS dev spaces. This is simple to address, if not entirely straightforward. I got tree working in my dev space, as you can see:

I did this by copying in a tree binary (and ensuring the execution bit was set). Where did I get that tree binary from? Well, first, I looked what the architecture of the dev spaces was, via uname (I've added whitespace for readability):

user: user $ uname -a
Linux workspaces-ws-nvzxc-deployment-9f9b9b656-sfdh5
5.15.135-gardenlinux-cloud-amd64 
SMP Debian 5.15.135-0gardenlinux1 (2023-10-12)
x86_64 GNU/Linux

I also checked what distribution the environment was based on:

user: user $ cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 12 \n \l

Basically, it's Debian 12 on x86_64 architecture. Classic. So then I created a quick container from a Debian 12 based container image, via a codespace that I spun up for the purpose, and copied the tree binary out of there to my local filesystem, like this:

gh codespace cp 'remote:/usr/bin/tree' .

I then copied that binary to the dev space by dragging it into the Explorer window, and then set the execution bit with chmod +x $HOME/tree.

Job done!

(Originally published on qmacro.org)