Cloud Workstation with custom Docker image will not start

[dbenoff]

Since data not under /home is wiped when the workstation is shut down, I need to create a custom docker image with my tools installed so I don't have to reinstall every session.

My dockerfile uses us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/cloud-workstations-images/predefined/code-oss:latest and then installs python tools and mysql.  It exposes ports 22 and 80.  That's it.

It works perfectly on my local docker and if I run it on docker inside a google VM it also works.  But if I use it in a google workstation, the workstation never starts.  It sits there starting up for several minutes then times out.

The error message I see in the logs is:
"message": "Start operation times out because config is degraded with message: Your workstation VM could not be provisioned due to an unknown error. The root cause can usually be found by checking your logs for related errors."

Of course, since the container doesn't start, there are no logs to check, so I am completely stuck.

I really like the workstation product but without custom images the product is worthless for actually getting work done.

Can anyone help?

[robertcarlos · Accepted solution]

Hi @dbenoff,

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

I understand that you want to deploy your custom docker image through Cloud Workstations. As of the moment, Cloud Workstations is still under pre-GA offerings terms, meaning this is similar to “Early Access,” “Alpha,” “Beta,” “Preview,” or “Experimental”. Some of its functionality may or may not work as intended or expected. You may want to check this link for Cloud Workstations overview.

You may want to file this as a bug in order for our engineers to have a take a look at this. Please be advised that we don't have a specific ETA for this. You may track for its updates once the ticket has been created.

[dbenoff]

Managed to get this working on a vanilla compute VM.  I wish I'd started there rather than waste time with this half baked workstation product.