Codespaces don't seem to count Terminal activity when considering inactivity

[sheridanvk]

Hi there - are there any plans to increase the scope of what counts as activity for keeping a codespace running? I often use them to carry out actions in the Terminal, but as far as I can tell, typing in the Terminal window doesn't seem to count as activity. I often find myself missing the message to keep the codespace from shutting down and losing my active session.

I understand I can increase the timeout to make this happen less often, but it seems like a shame to keep it running longer than I actually need it - a 30min timeout would be totally fine for me if it actually took my Terminal activity into account.

Thank you!

[drien]

This would be super useful...working on things that take a long time to run/build/process is annoying with the existing idle timeout behavior, and led my team to find alternatives to Codespaces. I had a thought that a couple of tiny CLI utils for controlling this behavior would be neat...for example:

codespaces --caffeinate # keep alive indefinitely

codespaces --caffeinate --hours 3 # keep alive for 3 hours

make; codespaces --sleep-now # sleep once something long has finished

[EarthmanWeb]

what counts as activity for keeping a codespace running

Expected behaviour - from:
https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/getting-started/deep-dive#closing-or-stopping-your-codespace

File changes from the editor and terminal output are counted as activity, so your codespace will not time out if terminal output is continuing.

So, it would seem yours is a feature request but mostly a bug report? I have created a similar one here:
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/60407

[benonymus]

I am tailing a docker logs in the the terminal and after I close the codespace but still interact with the running app the codespace stops after the defined inactivity period.
Why is that if there is terminal output?