We're excited to share our plans for workspace sharing and collaboration. This RFC outlines our approach to enabling multiple users to work together in shared development environments.

🤔 Problem

Many teams using Coder need shared development infrastructure but we currently lack native support for:

• Group-owned infrastructure: Multiple developers connecting to shared workspaces for QA, on-call rotations, and collaborative development
• Peer-to-peer sharing: Real-time workspace invitations for debugging, pair programming, and app reviews
• Shared staging environments: Teams wanting collaborative access to staging and testing environments

Today, these workflows require workarounds like shared ports, shared coder_apps or external tools. None of these provide a true collaborative experience in Coder workspaces.

✏ Proposal

We're designing a comprehensive workspace sharing system built on the ACL patterns from our existing template permissions:

Core Functionality

• Workspace ACL: Grant individual users or entire groups access to your workspaces
• In-dashboard share button: Workspaces can be easily shared using the in-dashboard "share" option
• Role-based permissions:
  • Use: Connect via SSH/apps, start/stop workspace, view logs and stats
  • Admin: All "use" permissions plus rename, update, and invite others (cannot delete)
  • Service account support: Administrators can use service accounts for group-owned workspaces
  • Automatic cleanup: Users lose Tailnet access when removed from ACL (workspace restart recommended)

Security & Governance

• Kill swtich: Administrators can disable sharing organization-wide or deployment-wide
• Audit logging: Track all workspace sharing grants and access
• Hierarchical ACL: Template ACLs will always supersede workspace ACLs
• Permission inheritance: New workspace.share permission required at organization member level
  • Can be revoked from default org members

User Experience

• CLI integration: Simple commands like coder sharing share dev --user alice --group contractors
• Dashboard visibility: See shared workspaces in workspace listings with filtering (shared:true)
• Editor support: Shared workspaces appear in VSCode extension, JetBrains, and Coder Connect
• Terraform integration: Control sharing policies via coderd_organization.workspace_sharing

Note on licensing

Shared workspaces will be available in OSS deployments. The RBAC controls to limit sharing (including custom roles) will be gated to premium deployments

🖼 Sneak Peek

User interface

The new "sharing" action in the workspace page.

CLI

# Share workspace with user(s)
coder sharing share dev --user alice

# Share workspace with group(s)
$ coder sharing share eve/dev --group=contractor,intern

🤝 Get Involved

This feature will fundamentally change how teams collaborate in Coder. We want to ensure we're building the right solution for your workflows.

Share your thoughts:

Which sharing scenarios are most critical for your team?
What security controls are non-negotiable in your environment?
How do you envision managing group-owned infrastructure?
Should sharing permissions expire automatically or persist until manually revoked?
How do you want shared infrastructure to be visualized?