Installing extensions from command line

It would be great to be able to script the installation of extensions, e.g. after starting code-server in a new container.

A feature similar to VScode’s code --install-extension would be very helpful. See the example here.

Or am I missing another way to install extensions to code-server from the command line?

[faustomorales]

@ThorbenJensen I think you can do this by just extending the Dockerfile as @jeasonstudio suggests.

For example, the following installs the Preview extension. I needed it because I couldn’t get the built-in Preview functions to work out-of-the-box and also it comes with Mermaid diagram support, which the built-in previewer does not.

RUN apt-get update && apt install -y bsdtar curl
RUN mkdir -p /root/.local/share/code-server/extensions
RUN curl -JL https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/publishers/searKing/vsextensions/preview-vscode/2.0.3/vspackage | bsdtar -xvf - extension
RUN mv extension /root/.local/share/code-server/extensions/searKing.preview-vscode-2.0.3

The lines above do the following.

1. Install bsdtar and curl. We install bsdtar because gnutar, which ships with Ubuntu and Debian, doesn’t function properly with the archives we get from the Visual Studio web site.
2. Create an extensions subdirectory for the code-server data directory. The data directory path above (/root/.local/share/code-server/) is the default from what I can tell. You can look at the logs to verify that it’s the same with your configuration. You’ll see something like INFO Initializing {"data-dir":"/root/.local/share/code-server","working-dir": ...,"log-dir": ...} when starting the container.
3. Download and extract the extension file from the Visual Studio web site. The URL follows the form https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/publishers/<PUBLISHER>/vsextensions/<EXTENSION-NAME>/<VERSION>/vspackage. We only extract the extension folder.
4. Move the extension folder to a properly named folder of the form <PUBLISHER>.<EXTENSION-NAME>-<VERSION> in the extensions subdirectory.

If all goes well, you should be able to get the following.

Hope this helps!

[deansheather]

@jagraj The recommended way to install extensions now is to use code-server --install-extension <value>. You can give it the path to a .vsix file or the ID (looks like organization.extension-name).