Anysphere Remote SSH plugin does not support interactive terminal sessions

[Jamie_Keene]

Describe the Bug

Our company uses cloud-based development instances hosted on Google Cloud, and protected by identity-aware proxy. To access these requires that users have an active gcloud auth token, so our login script refreshes this allowing users to reauthenticate if needed.

As we have migrated from VSCode to Cursor (and MS Remote SSH plugin to Anysphere’s) we’ve seen that as Anysphere’s version of the plugin runs in a non-interactive version of the terminal this isn’t possible.

With MS, the following flags worked but are no longer supported:

"remote.SSH.showLoginTerminal": true,
"remote.SSH.useLocalServer": false,
"remote.SSH.useExecServer": false,

Can Anysphere please add an option to run the Remote SSH session in an interactive terminal, or suggest an alternative workaround?

Steps to Reproduce

• Use remote SSH plugin to log into cloud-hosted instances which require gcloud auth login as part of the login script
• Observe that this fails
• Observe in the logs the line: There was a problem refreshing your current auth tokens: Reauthentication failed. cannot prompt during non-interactive execution.

Expected Behavior

Plugin should be able to prompt the user to reauthenticate (via credentials, or other passkeys) and await a response.

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.2.4 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: a8e95743c5268be73767c46944a71f4465d05c90
Date: 2025-07-10T16:55:16.443Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.5.0

Additional Information

Our only workaround is to run gcloud auth login in another terminal and then open the session in Cursor, but this is very annoying!

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

[Jamie_Keene]

@ravirahman as he has been involved with many similar bugs – thank you!

[ravirahman]

Hi @Jamie_Keene, thanks for this feature request. We are looking into how we can support this. In the meantime, are there ways to make the login non-interactive (e.g. caching the login token, so users can first authenticate in a terminal outside of Cursor?)

[Jamie_Keene]

Thanks Ravi. We already do this, but it’s frustrating for something that used to just work.

Is it possible to sideload the MS plugin in the meantime?

[ravirahman]

The Microsoft SSH extension is currently not available in cursor due to restrictions on how third-party extensions can be distributed through the Cursor marketplace.

[Liamazing]

Hi Ravi, any chance that you could give us a guide to how we could use VSCode to download the proper versions of the MS extensions and then copy them into the cursor extensions directory and modify the cursor extensions.json? I worked on this for a few hours but couldn’t quite figure out the proper recipe.

[ravirahman]

Unfortunately not – in addition to the licensing restrictions, the VSCode extension is hard-coded to only work with VSCode.

[Jamie_Keene]

Hey @ravirahman – nudging to keep this thread open. Any news to share here?

[ravirahman]

Hi @Jamie_Keene, not yet, though we are working on an update to support this.

Could you share more about the gcloud auth login configuration that you have? Is this a setting that Google offers that we could enable, or is this part of a custom workflow?

[Jamie_Keene]

We have a custom login script which handles our auth with Google Cloud and sets up the tunnel to the remote server.

Docs are here: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/connect/ssh-using-iap#gcloud

And the specific command which is now broken is:
gcloud compute ssh --tunnel-through-iap

This handles both initial auth (web authn) and also reauthentication (e.g. we can just tap a yubikey to reauthenticate rather than going through the web flow, which isn’t possible using the workaround). IIUC the Anysphere plugin using the Output panel rather than an interactive Terminal limits the interactivity which the command above enables.

[ravirahman]

Hi @Jamie_Keene, thank you for your patience as we worked through this issue. We just released verison 1.0.24 of the extension, which respects the setting remote.SSH.showLoginTerminal, and when enabled, will show the terminal to establish the SSH connection. Could you try upgrading to the latest version of the extension?

[Jamie_Keene]

Hey @ravirahman

Thanks for letting us know! Appreciate the effort and progress

Unfortunately it doesn’t quite seem to work, and the log throws the error that it’s still non-interactive.

Is there a way I can share logs with you without posting them onto the forum? Or can we set up a call so I can show you?

Thanks!

[Jamie_Keene]

Aha, scratch that – a tweak to our login script did it.

Massive thank you, @ravirahman and team