Trying to download a complete folder from the Explorer: "can't open this folder because it contains system files [Choose a different folder]"

[drmrbrewer]

This relates to code-server 3.12.0.

When I want to download a file to my local filesystem I right-click on the file in the Explorer and choose "Download..." -- works fine... downloads right away to the Downloads folder on my local drive (without any prompt for where to save... which is fine).

But when I right-click on a folder to download the entire folder, I get the following message:

... where the redacted part is just the domain on which code-server instance is hosted e.g. codeserver.mydomain.com.

And no, the folder does not contain system files... not sure whether it's referring to the remote folder or local folder, but either way there are no system files.

I'm not even sure it's possible to download an entire folder in code-server / VSCode? I sure hope it is possible, and it feels like it's trying to do the download (not just saying it's not possible to download folders). Certainly on Cloud9 it is/was possible to download either a file or folder in this way, direct from the Explorer... for a folder it is just zipped and downloaded the folder as a zip (or maybe gz... either way is fine).

[jsjoeio]

Hmm...this is very strange 🤔 @code-asher have you seen this before?

[code-asher]

I have not seen it before. The last time I tried it was not even possible to download a folder so maybe it is new functionality that does not quite work yet. We will need to poke into the error.

[drmrbrewer]

@code-asher the same thing happens when I try to download a file (in my example a log.html file) that is too big to open and show (completely) in the editor, i.e. downloading a file where the following message appears merely trying to open the file into the editor:

Downloading a smaller version of the same log.html file works just fine.

[code-asher]

Ooo that is very interesting.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no activity occurs in the next 5 days.

[drmrbrewer]

I'm still seeing this (and being slightly frustrated by this) several times a day, so it would be great it this issue wasn't marked as stale!

[thomasapto]

I'm seeing the same problem. Following the instructions at here, on a Mac (Monterey 12.4). Tried various likely places to download to, starting with ~/Downloads, the default ~/Documents, and ~/Desktop. (BTW, Downloads permission should be in place: it is in system prefs > Security & Privacy > Files and Folders, as Google Chrome.app (checkmark) Downloads Folder. I'm loathe to give Chrome "Full Disk Access" which is unchecked.)

UPDATE: what finally worked was choosing /tmp (which is actually /private/tmp), with a couple of warnings along the lines of "github.dev will be able to read files until it's restarted".

(At this point, my question is, what is this github.dev thing? Maybe that's what I need to be giving permissions to? It's not a real application though...)

Thanks

Screen shot below: I right-clicked on pyqldbsamples > Download...

[code-asher]

(At this point, my question is, what is this `github.dev` thing? Maybe that's what I need to be giving permissions to? It's not a real application though...)

github.dev seems to be the website. The browser has its own per-website permissions separate from OS-level permissions. You can go to the privacy and security settings in the browser to explicitly set permissions for a website but I did not see anything there for this particular permission so I think accepting the prompts as they come up might be the only way to give permissions for this. I am not sure why the browser is insisting there are system files when there are not. I assume it is specific to macOS since I have not been able to reproduce on Linux. Maybe this is a bug upstream with Chrome? We should also try reproducing with Codespaces to see if it is specific to code-server. Maybe there is some hidden file macOS or Chrome thinks is a system file? Similar to a .DS_Store or something. @jsjoeio Does this reproduce for you?

[jsjoeio]

Can't reproduce

I'm testing right now on my macOS + Brave + code-server 4.5.1.

I actually don't have the option to download folders 🤔

And come to think of it, I don't know if I have ever?

Same behavior in github.dev

I also don't see the Download option in github.dev...so I feel like this is a limitation upstream?

Open issues

It seems like this is a limitation of Code Web so I don't think we can't do anything about this.

microsoft/vscode#120908

[code-asher]

Nice find on that issue! I guess Chrome considers Downloads a system folder.

[jsjoeio]

Since this has been identified as an upstream limitation, I'm going to close this since I don't think we can work around this.