Issues downloading files from a Codespace

[alfredodeza]

Students doing ML work are facing issues trying to download files from a Codespace and getting an error message similar to this:

This is problematic because it isn't clear what these "system files" may be even though the target directory is the Downloads one. Clicking on the "Choose a different folder" gives another message that is not clear on the implications of accepting:

In this case, is it true that the Codespace instance is going to edit files in the destination directory?

Lastly, none of these messages appear with other types of files. It only happens with a specific one: a downloaded model from HuggingFace with a .bin extension.

Reproduce

To replicate the issue in any Codespace instance:

1. Install the Transformers Huggingface library with pip install transformers
2. Download a model with:

fromtransformersimportpipelinemodel=pipeline( "summarization", model="sshleifer/distilbart-cnn-12-6", revision="a4f8f3e", ) model.save_pretrained("summarizeApp")

3. Attempt to download the resulting pytorch_model.bin

Workarounds

Currently, this means granting access and accepting that Codespaces can edit files or create a new, empty directory with no contents that appears to not have any warning messages.

Other related information

This issue only happens with Codespaces on the web. Issue is reproducible with Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. It does not happen with Visual Studio Code running locally but connected to a remote Codespace.

Possibly unrelated: Download speeds seem to be throttled to less than 10mb/s

[joshspicer]

👋 , I believe this is a security feature of your browser's file system API. In order for the file system API to let a website view/write to a directory on your computer, the destination folder needs to not contain files your browser deems "system files". I believe a file ending in .bin would qualify.

I found similar discussion on the VS Code repo: microsoft/vscode#144753 (comment)

Some workarounds i'd like to suggest are:

1. Use the gh cs cp command in the GitHub CLI to copy files.
2. Use the VS Code client to connect and download from there.
3. Select a destination directory that doesn't have files that appear to be "system files" to avoid issues your browser's security features. That may mean not using the web to download files that end in .bin
4. Attempt with a non-chromium browser (Safari or Firefox) and see if that may help.
5. Start a quick python webserver (python -m http.server) and forward the port. You can then use port forwarding to download the file.

[alfredodeza]

Thanks for replying @joshspicer . I did go through the VSCode issue and read through the reference code. The issue I'm reporting is slightly different however. The destination folder does not contain any system files. Are you saying that downloading a ".bin" file from Codespaces to a folder would be the same as "destination containing system files" ?

As I covered in the report as well, even if that is the case, an empty ~/tmp directory does work to download the .bin file. If I can't really download a .bin file, how is this allowed in an empty directory?