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> VM seems like a good way to add some protection.

Yeah, but someone should try to fix this anyway. It's not a nodejs-specific problem, but it's badly needed in node. Any of the 100s of authors whose packages I depend on might have made a typo, or just been careless. Software development requires a scary level of trust.

I am also increasingly moving to VMs. I want tools (such as VSCode) to run on the main machine, but actual execution to happen in the vm. It's a bit painful and a drag on productivity, especially debugging.



The one trick I found that work well is to move everything in the VM. I usually opt for either emacs or vim, and if I need an IDE, I install i3. It just takes a moment to copy my dotfiles over.


I'm doing something similar.

My development environment for work is defined in a Dockerfile, and I have a small shell script whose only purpose is to call `docker run` with that image, mount a few volumes for caching, mount the CWD in "/workspace", and start a shell in there. Development is done with nvim.

If I need Docker Compose, I run it from the host. For projects that I find unpleasant to work with in this way, I use GitHub Codespaces. I hadn't thought about using a GUI IDE from within a VM, so thanks to your comment (EDIT: and also the submitted article) I now have something new to try!


VSCode assumes that the remote side is trusted. So if VM is compromised, VSCode on the host can be compromised as well.

For this reason I run VSCode inside the VM.


Can you point me to some documentation or proof of concept for this? Would definitely like to change my workflow if this is the case.


Have you looked into something like Qubes OS?




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