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Persistent Shared Workspaces

Note

This guide requires a Premium license because service accounts are a Premium feature. For more details, contact your account team.

This guide walks through setting up a long-lived workspace that is owned by a service account and shared with a rotating set of users. Because no single person owns the workspace, it persists across team changes and every user authenticates as themselves.

This pattern is useful for any scenario where a workspace outlives the people who use it:

On-call rotations — Engineers share a workspace pre-loaded with runbooks, dashboards, and monitoring tools. Access rotates with the shift schedule.
Shared staging or QA — A team workspace hosts a persistent staging environment. Testers and reviewers are added and removed as sprints change.
Pair programming — A service-account-owned workspace gives two or more developers a shared environment without either one owning (and accidentally deleting) it.
Contractor onboarding — An external team gets scoped access to a workspace for the duration of an engagement, then access is revoked.

The steps below use an on-call SRE workspace as a running example, but the same commands apply to any of the scenarios above. Substitute the usernames, group names, and template to match your use case.

Prerequisites

A running Coder deployment (v2.32+) with workspace sharing enabled. Sharing is on by default for OSS; Premium deployments may require admin configuration.
The Coder CLI installed and authenticated.
An account with the Owner or User Admin role.
OIDC authentication configured so shared users log in with their corporate SSO identity. Configure refresh tokens to prevent session timeouts during long work sessions.
A wildcard access URL configured (e.g. *.coder.example.com) so that shared users can access workspace apps without a 404.
(Recommended) IdP Group Sync configured if your identity provider manages group membership for the teams that will share the workspace.

1. Create a service account

Create a dedicated service account that will own the shared workspace. Service accounts are non-human accounts intended for automation and shared ownership. Because no individual user owns the workspace, there are no personal credentials to expose and the shared environment is not affected when any user leaves the team or the organization.

# On-call example — substitute a name that fits your use case
coder users create \
  --username oncall-sre \
  --service-account

2. Generate an API token for the service account

Generate a long-lived API token so you can create and manage workspaces on behalf of the service account:

coder tokens create \
  --user oncall-sre \
  --name oncall-automation \
  --lifetime 8760h

Store this token securely (e.g. in a secrets manager like Vault or AWS Secrets Manager).

Important

Never distribute this token to end users. The token is for workspace administration only. Shared users authenticate as themselves and reach the workspace through sharing.

3. Create the workspace

Authenticate as the service account and create the workspace:

export CODER_SESSION_TOKEN="<token-from-step-2>"

coder create oncall-sre/oncall-workspace \
  --template your-oncall-template \
  --use-parameter-defaults \
  --yes

Tip

Design a dedicated template for the workspace with the tools your team needs pre-installed (e.g. monitoring dashboards for on-call, test runners for QA). Set subdomain = true on workspace apps so that shared users can access web-based tools without a 404. See Accessing workspace apps in shared workspaces.

Use coder sharing share to grant access to users who need the workspace:

coder sharing share oncall-sre/oncall-workspace --user alice

This gives alice the default use role, which allows connection via SSH and workspace apps, starting and stopping the workspace, and viewing logs and stats.

To grant admin permissions (which includes all use permissions as well as renaming, updating, and inviting others to join with the use role):

coder sharing share oncall-sre/oncall-workspace --user alice:admin

To share with multiple users at once:

coder sharing share oncall-sre/oncall-workspace --user alice:admin,bob

To share with an entire Coder group:

coder sharing share oncall-sre/oncall-workspace --group sre-oncall

Note

Groups can be synced from your identity provider using IdP Sync. If your IdP already manages team membership, sharing with a group is the simplest approach.

5. Rotate access

When team membership changes, remove outgoing users and add incoming ones:

# Remove outgoing user
coder sharing remove oncall-sre/oncall-workspace --user alice

# Add incoming user
coder sharing share oncall-sre/oncall-workspace --user carol

Important

The workspace must be restarted for user removal to take effect.

Verify current sharing status at any time:

coder sharing status oncall-sre/oncall-workspace

6. Automate access changes (optional)

For use cases with frequent rotation (such as on-call shifts), you can integrate the share/remove commands into external tooling like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or a cron job.

Rotation script

#!/bin/bash
# rotate-access.sh
# Usage: ./rotate-access.sh <outgoing-user> <incoming-user>

WORKSPACE="oncall-sre/oncall-workspace"
OUTGOING="$1"
INCOMING="$2"

if [ -n "$OUTGOING" ]; then
  echo "Removing access for $OUTGOING..."
  coder sharing remove "$WORKSPACE" --user "$OUTGOING"
fi

echo "Granting access to $INCOMING..."
coder sharing share "$WORKSPACE" --user "$INCOMING"

echo "Restarting workspace to apply changes..."
coder restart "$WORKSPACE" --yes

echo "Current sharing status:"
coder sharing status "$WORKSPACE"

Group-based rotation with IdP Sync

If your identity provider manages group membership (e.g. an sre-oncall group in Okta or Azure AD), you can skip manual share/remove commands entirely:

Configure Group Sync to synchronize the group from your IdP to Coder.
Share the workspace with the group once:

coder sharing share oncall-sre/oncall-workspace --group sre-oncall
When your IdP rotates group membership, Coder group membership updates on next login. All current members have access; removed members lose access after a workspace restart.

Finding shared workspaces

Shared users can find workspaces shared with them:

# List all workspaces shared with you
coder list --search shared:true

# List workspaces shared with a specific user
coder list --search shared_with_user:alice

# List workspaces shared with a specific group
coder list --search shared_with_group:sre-oncall

Troubleshooting

Shared user sees 404 on workspace apps

Workspace apps using path-based routing block non-owners by default. Configure a wildcard access URL and set subdomain = true on the workspace app in your template.

Removed user still has access

Access removal requires a workspace restart. Run coder restart <workspace> after removing a user or group.

Group sync not updating membership

Group membership changes in your IdP are not reflected until the user logs out and back in. Group sync runs at login time, not on a polling schedule. Check the Coder server logs with CODER_LOG_FILTER=".*userauth.*|.*groups returned.*" for details. See Troubleshooting group sync for more information.