Hi @jaulz, thanks for opening the issue.

I can think of a couple of options that may help here.

1. Introduce a new terraform option to toggle ssh for the agent

resource "coder_agent" "coder" {
  ssh = false
}

This would remove the agent from the pool of possible agents to connect to. If you only have one, you'll get the desired behavior. Otherwise you'll need to specify which agent you want (ssh coder.workspace.agent1).

2. Introduce a sorting/prioritizing option in terraform

resource "coder_agent" "agent2" {
  priority = 2
}
resource "coder_agent" "agent1" {
  priority = 1
}

This could be reflected in the UI and also when e.g. generating ssh configs. (This could be called order instead.)

3. Manual sorting in WebUI

This doesn't help with SSH, but perhaps another option is to allow each user to manually sort their workspaces. Could be combined with option 1 and it might be useful even in the presence of option 2.

Do any of these sound like what you would like to see in the Coder?

PS. If you can share, I would love to know more about your use-case for multiple agents.

@mafredri yep, point 2 actually sounds like a good solution which would be even better than just having a default property which I had originally in mind. My use-case for having multiple-agents is actually what I mentioned in another issue: I would like to run commands in some of the containers in order to view logs etc.

Not sure about putting layout controls in the template HCL. We have a similar problem with the display of agent / resource metadata. Maybe we should introduce a new product concept for layout.

@ammario the actual idea would be that the priority can be used to define the default agent. The actual order in the layout would just be a nice side effect 😊

@ammario could you elaborate why this one is not planned? Thanks!

@jaulz — that's stalebot so it's more a matter of insufficient engineering resources to tackle this than thinking it's out of scope of the Coder project.

I see one approach that may be orthogonal with our existing concepts:

coder_metadata at the moment has a hide boolean. We could replace this with a priority number and sort ascending on the UI. If priority is <0 we could hide the value. This would be a breaking change but the upgrade path is simple enough that it may not even be worth deprecating hide before removing it.

@mafredri since you were thinking about this recently I'm curious for your thought on the idea.

Is there any possibility to change the order of coder agents in web interface when you view the workspace? I have multiple agents and my main workspace is listed last. This is not a big deal but when I try to connect from CLI to my workspace (via coder ssh) it connects to the one listed first.

As per my observation, this current order is random and the agent that connects first goes to the top.

@ammario I think that's an acceptable strategy for both agent and metadata. Currently we use order for parameters, and I don't think we have a precedent for priority, but I think the terminology is acceptable. It'd be nice to unify all three, though.

While we're at it, I think it'd be a good idea to ensure we have a robust ordering in the case of collision/absence of prioritization (e.g. alphabetical), which behaves the same way everywhere. (It'd be how we pick the default agent to SSH to, for instance.)

OTOH, I think it's sensible to have hide as well, from the perspective of it being easier to explain/understand than having prioritization affecting visibility.

order is a good point. We should keep the terminology the same.

I'm going with this issue.