Support for custom user IDs in Envbox workspaces

[NickSquangler]

It would be helpful to have the ability to customize the user ID (UID) for workspaces. This would help customers that need a way to assign specific UIDs to users when starting workspaces, in order to match permissions on their mounted drives.

Current state: Envbox automatically detects and uses the "coder" user from the image

Ideal State: customers are able to create a custom user with a specific UID during the workspace startup process. This would allow them to properly set permissions for accessing NFS-mounted directories with existing Linux-style UID-based permissions.

[adrianmlops]

We’re also very interested in this feature.

We’ve deployed Coder on EKS, using FSx Lustre for shared storage. For quite some time, our setup worked fine with the default Coder user (uid=1000), and all workspaces mounted the FSx volumes without permission issues.

However, after introducing Envbox, we’ve run into significant problems when trying to mix Envbox and non-Envbox workspaces. Envbox doesn’t preserve the uid=1000—it remaps and uses uid=101000 instead. This causes permissions on FSx to change whenever an Envbox workspace is created, breaking access for the other workspaces.

We tried modifying the Envbox userns-remap setting in the image (changing it from "userns-remap": "coder" to "userns-remap": "disabled") in hopes of forcing it to use uid=1000, but unfortunately we couldn’t get that change to propagate properly through the workspace startup.

If anyone has suggestions on alternative ways to enforce uid=1000 in Envbox-based workspaces—or other solution to prevent the change of FSx permissions—we’d love to hear them.

Thanks!