Using Visual Studio Code for remote editing and debugging.; 2 minutes to read; s; In this article. For those of you that are familiar with the ISE, you may recall that you could run psedit file.ps1 from the integrated console to open files - local or remote - right in the ISE.
Open any folder of any remote Github Repository and take advantage of Visual Studio Code's full feature set. Installation Launch VS Code Quick Open ( Ctrl+P ), paste the following command, and press enter. May 02, 2019 TL;DR # Today we're excited to announce the preview of three new extensions for Visual Studio Code that enable seamless development in Containers, remotely on physical or virtual machines, and with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). You can get started right away by installing the Remote Development Extension Pack. Browse other questions tagged visual-studio-code gdb or ask your own question. Visual Studio 2017 Linux remote debugging (gdbserver) 2. GDB Remote Debugging. VSCode Remote Control. This extension allows you to remotely control Visual Studio Code. Run commands from anywhere you want on your device. The extension allows you to take VSCode automation to the next level. In the background it uses websockets in order to listen to commands it should execute in your VSCode instance.
-->Visual Studio Code, along with the Remote - WSL extension, enables you to use WSL as your full-time development environment directly from VS Code. You can:
- develop in a Linux-based environment
- use Linux-specific toolchains and utilities
- run and debug your Linux-based applications from the comfort of Windows while maintaining access to productivity tools like Outlook and Office
- use the VS Code built-in terminal to run your Linux distribution of choice
- take advantage of VS Code features like Intellisense code completion, linting, debug support, code snippets, and unit testing
- easily manage your version control with VS Code's built-in Git support
- run commands and VS Code extensions directly on your WSL projects
- edit files in your Linux or mounted Windows filesystem (for example /mnt/c) without worrying about pathing issues, binary compatibility, or other cross-OS challenges
Install VS Code and the Remote WSL extension
- Visit the VS Code install page and select the 32 or 64 bit installer. Install Visual Studio Code on Windows (not in your WSL file system).
- When prompted to Select Additional Tasks during installation, be sure to check the Add to PATH option so you can easily open a folder in WSL using the code command.
- Install the Remote Development extension pack. This extension pack includes the Remote - WSL extension, in addition to the Remote - SSH, and Remote - Containers extensions, enabling you to open any folder in a container, on a remote machine, or in WSL.
Important
In order to install the Remote-WSL extension, you will need the 1.35 May release version or later of VS Code. We do not recommend using WSL in VS Code without the Remote-WSL extension as you will lose support for auto-complete, debugging, linting, etc. Fun fact: this WSL extension is installed in $HOME/.vscode/extensions (enter the command
ls $HOME.vscodeextensions
in PowerShell).Update your Linux distribution
Some WSL Linux distributions are lacking libraries that are required by the VS Code server to start up. You can add additional libraries into your Linux distribution by using its package manager.
For example, to update Debian or Ubuntu, use:
To add wget (to retrieve content from web servers) and ca-certificates (to allow SSL-based applications to check for the authenticity of SSL connections), enter:
Open a WSL project in Visual Studio Code
From the command-line
To open a project from your WSL distribution, open the distribution's command line and enter:
code .
From VS Code
You can also access more VS Code Remote options by using the shortcut:
CTRL+SHIFT+P
in VS Code to bring up the command palette. If you then type Remote-WSL
you will see a list of the VS Code Remote options available, allowing you to reopen the folder in a remote session, specify which distribution you want to open in, and more.Extensions inside of VS Code Remote
The Remote-WSL extension splits VS Code into a “client-server” architecture, with the client (the user interface) running on your Windows machine and the server (your code, Git, plugins, etc) running remotely. Wavepad sound editor free download old version.
When running VS Code Remote, selecting the 'Extensions' tab will display a list of extensions split between your local machine and your WSL distribution.
Installing a local extension, like a theme, only needs to be installed once.
Some extensions, like the Python extension or anything that handles things like linting or debugging, must be installed separately on each remote WSL distributions. VS Code will display a warning icon ⚠, along with a green 'Install in WSL' button, if you have an extension locally installed that is not installed on your WSL Remote.
For further information, see the VS Code docs:
- When VS Code Remote is started in WSL, no shell startup scripts are run. See this advanced environment setup script article for more info on how to run additional commands or modify the environment.
- Having problems launching VS Code from your WSL command line? This troubleshooting guide includes tips on changing path variables, resolving extension errors about missing dependencies, resolving Git line ending issues, installing a local VSIX on a remote machine, launching a browser window, blocker localhost port, web sockets not working, errors storing extension data, and more.
Install Git (optional)
If you plan to collaborate with others, or host your project on an open-source site (like GitHub), VS Code supports version control with Git. The Source Control tab in VS Code tracks all of your changes and has common Git commands (add, commit, push, pull) built right into the UI.
To install Git, see set up Git to work with Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Install Windows Terminal (optional)
The new Windows Terminal enables multiple tabs (quickly switch between Command Prompt, PowerShell, or multiple Linux distributions), custom key bindings (create your own shortcut keys for opening or closing tabs, copy+paste, etc.), emojis ☺, and custom themes (color schemes, font styles and sizes, background image/blur/transparency). Learn more in the Windows Terminal docs.
- Get Windows Terminal in the Microsoft Store: By installing via the store, updates are handled automatically.
- Once installed, open Windows Terminal and select Settings to customize your terminal using the
profile.json
file.
Additional Resources
A few additional extensions you may want to consider include:
- Keymaps from other editors: These extensions can help your environment feel right at home if you're transitioning from another text editor (like Atom, Sublime, Vim, eMacs, Notepad++, etc).
- Settings Sync: Enables you to synchronize your VS Code settings across different installations using GitHub. If you work on different machines, this helps keep your environment consistent across them.
- Debugger for Chrome: Once you finish developing on the server side with Linux, you'll need to develop and test the client side. This extension integrates your VS Code editor with your Chrome browser debugging service, making things a bit more efficient.
May 2, 2019 by The VS Code Team, @code
TL;DR
Today we're excited to announce the preview of three new extensions for Visual Studio Code that enable seamless development in Containers, remotely on physical or virtual machines, and with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). You can get started right away by installing the Remote Development Extension Pack.
Note: You'll need to use the Insiders build for now, but remote development support will eventually be available in the Stable release.
Read on to learn how we got here.
Development Trends
With the growth in popularity of VS Code, we've had the privilege and opportunity to talk to more and more users with different development environments, many vastly different than our own, to try to identify ways in which we could move VS Code forward to address real developer pain points.
An interesting pattern emerged during these conversations. We saw many developers trying to use VS Code to develop against containers and remote VMs configured with specific development and runtime stacks, simply because it is too hard, too disruptive, and in some cases impossible, to set up these development environments locally.
We've all experienced this problem. Unless we feel it's time to flatten that machine :), we hesitate to try out a new stack like Rust, Go, Node, or Python3, for fear of 'messing up' our current, well-tuned environment.
Python developers want to switch to VS Code but can't, because they need to use containers and virtual machines as development environments configured for a specific Python stack.
Because the code bases are so large, we see engineers at shops like Facebook (and Microsoft!) use editors like vim to work remotely against secure and powerful 'developer VMs', using alternative cloud-based search and navigation services that scale beyond what even the best laptop can handle.
Using Visual Studio Code For Remote Development
Data Scientists building and training data models often need massive storage and compute services to analyze large datasets that can't be stored or processed even on a robust desktop.
The rise in popularity of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is powered in part because it makes it easy to set up a contained development environment, including the target operating system. In fact, the third most commented issue in the VS Code repository is to support running
code
from a Bash terminal in a Linux distro on Windows.Challenges with Current Solutions
Throughout these conversations, we also kept hearing the same challenges developers face with this type of development.
- Remote Desktop can work, but it is difficult or impossible to set up on some Linux distributions, and the development experience can be 'laggy'.
- SSH and Vim (or local tools with file synchronization) work, but they can be slow, error prone, and generally lack the productivity of modern development tools.
- Browser-based tools are useful in a variety of scenarios, but developers don't want to give up the richness and familiarity that desktop tools provide, or their existing locally installed tool chains.
Worse (in our opinion!) developers had to sacrifice core VS Code experiences like IntelliSense (completions), linting, and debugging, in order to work against these environments.
A Different Approach
Hearing about these challenges we started to look into WSL support and it looked simple enough. Install VS Code and (carefully at the time!) edit the Windows file system as normal. We did work to enable remote debugging for Node.js, and we figured we could simply install a small script to enable launching
code
from the bash shell.But, it just wasn't right. It didn't make sense to do special work for every runtime, as we did for Node.js debugging. If you have Python 2.7 and Flask installed on Windows (or none at all!) and Python 3.7 and Django installed in the Linux distro, you wouldn't get proper completions or linting because VS Code was looking at the Windows versions of everything. Having to duplicate the development environment on both Windows and Linux defeated the purpose of having WSL at all.
We convinced ourselves that what we needed was a way to run VS Code in two places at once, to run the developer tools locally and connect to a set of development services running remotely in the context of a physical or virtual machine (for example, a container or VM). This gives you a rich local development experience in the context of what is in the remote environment.
Introducing the VS Code Remote Extensions
Over the past few months, we've been working hard re-establishing proper boundaries between our code layers and eliminating assumptions about the local development environment. We've built three new extensions for working with remote workspaces running in WSL, Docker containers, or in physical and virtual machines over SSH.
The Remote - WSL extension lets you use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as a full development environment, right from VS Code. This new, optimized support lets you:
- Use Windows to develop in a Linux-based environment, using platform-specific toolchains and utilities.
- Edit files located in WSL or the mounted Windows filesystem (for example
/mnt/c
). - Run and debug your Linux-based applications on Windows.
Commands and extensions are run directly in the Linux distro, so you don't have to worry about pathing issues, binary compatibility, or other cross-OS challenges. You're able to use VS Code in WSL just as you would from Windows.
Check out this quick, 2-minute video to see how easy it is to develop in WSL.
For more information, please see the Developing in WSL documentation.
The Remote - SSH extension lets you open folders or workspaces hosted on any remote machine, VM, or container with a running SSH server. Development over SSH lets you:
- Develop on larger, faster, or more specialized hardware than your local machine.
- Quickly swap between different, remote development environments and safely make updates without worrying about impacting your local machine.
- Debug an application running somewhere else, such as a customer site or in the cloud.
For example, let's assume you are working on a deep learning project. You typically need a GPU-heavy virtual machine (such as an Azure Data Science Virtual Machine), configured with all of the tools and frameworks you need to train your models with large-scale data sets.
You could use Vim over SSH or Jupyter Notebooks to edit your remote code, but you give up the richness of your local development tools. Instead, with the Remote - SSH extension, you simply connect to the VM, install the necessary extensions like Python, and then you can leverage all of the great features of VS Code such as IntelliSense (completions), code navigation, and debugging, as if you were working locally.
Check out this quick, 2-minute video to see how easy it is to develop on a virtual machine over SSH.
For more information, please see the Developing using SSH documentation.
The Remote - Containers extension lets you use a Docker container as your development container. Containers make great development environments because:
- You can develop with a consistent and easily reproducible tool chain, on the same operating system you are deploying to.
- Containers are isolated, meaning you can quickly swap between different development environments without impacting your local machine.
- It easy for others to contribute to your project as they can easily develop, build, and test in a consistent development environment.
A
devcontainer.json
file can be used to tell VS Code how to configure the development container, including the Dockerfile
to use, ports to open, and extensions to install in the container. When VS Code finds a devcontainer.json
in the workspace, it automatically builds (if necessary) the image, starts the container, and connects to it. Your files are mounted into the container so you can open files and start editing with full IntelliSense (completions), code navigation, debugging, and more.Check out this quick, 2-minute video to see Development Containers in action.
For more information on development containers, please see the Developing inside a Container documentation as well as the vscode-remote-try-* repositories that contain samples you can use today.
Managing Extensions
When developing remotely, VS Code will attempt to infer where to install an extension, locally or remotely, based on the functionality it exposes. Extensions fall into one of two categories:
- UI Extensions are installed locally. These extensions only customize the UI and do not access files in a workspace, which means they can run entirely on the local machine. Since they are installed locally, they are always available to you independent of the workspace you are working in. Examples of UI extensions are themes, snippets, language grammars, and keymaps.
- Workspace Extensions are installed remotely. They access files and folders in a workspace for editing, to provide IntelliSense (completions), GoTo Definition, debugging, and more. These extensions may customize the UI. Logitech g pro wireless hub review. These extensions run remotely so that they have full access to the file system and tools on the remote host.
Most extensions have been updated and work properly in a remote environment, but if you encounter some that do not, please do submit an issue on the extension.
Extension Authors
If you are creating VS Code extensions, we've implemented new extension APIs that are remote aware. For example, instead of using the
open
package to load a browser window, an extension author should use the vscode.env.openExternal
API, which will open the browser locally. Similarly, there is a new clipboard
class, which will place contents on the local clipboard, as expected.Many more details can be found in the updated API Documentation, including how to run, test, and debug your extension in a remote environment.
Get Started
Thanks for reading this far!
Here are 3 quick steps to get started doing Visual Studio Code Remote Development:
- Install the Insiders build. You'll need this for remote development until it is available in Stable. The Insiders build ships daily with the latest features and bug fixes. If you are concerned about stability, don't be! We use the Insiders builds to develop VS Code and it can be installed side by side with Stable in case something does break (and let us know).
- Get the Remote Development Extension Pack, which installs support for WSL, SSH, and Containers and is the easiest way to get started. If you don't need them all, you can uninstall the individual extensions.
- Read the Docs. Try the Dev Container samples. If you develop with Python (many of you do!), check out Dan Taylor's blog post on remote Python development.
Last, if you run into problems, please submit an issue. For answers to common questions, see our FAQ.
Let us know what you think!
Developing On Remote Machines Using SSH And Visual Studio Code
Happy Coding,
The @code team