Sharing my approach to use VSCode Settings Sync and official extension market

First, thanks for this great project, this is much easier to use than Che and Theia

Two problems I’ve come across during my day of use are

• Extensions are cached and installed from Coder’s server, most of which for now are outdated
• Cannot Sync settings with VSCode

My approach

So I made a Docker template to automatically configure code-server from Settings Sync Gist.

Using Docker’s multi-stage build, I can directly use the actual Visual Studio Code binary to install extensions from Microsoft’s server, and then later copy them to code-server. And VSCode settings are also directly fed into code-server.

extensions.json parsing and installing

Is done the UNIX way.

jq -r ".[].metadata.publisherId" extensions.json > extensions.list

while IFS='' read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
    echo "Installing $line using VSCode";
    code --user-data-dir /root/.config/Code --install-extension $line
done < "$1" # extensions.list

For those of you who already use Settings Sync, my configuration might be handy as you only need to change the gist id to make the entire thing work.

Relevant Issues: #30 #145 My template: https://github.com/LER0ever/EvDev

Screenshot, almost the same as my VSCode:

[ezh]

@LER0ever Thank you very much for information.

I updated your solution a bit. Now, everything that I need is only update extensions file and do docker build ... https://github.com/ezh/code-server/blob/ide/Dockerfile https://github.com/ezh/code-server/blob/ide/extensions

I get extension id directly from URL of VSCode market. For example https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rebornix.Ruby rebornix.Ruby is extension id.

[davefinster]

I took a somewhat heavier handed approach. I build a docker image containing the real VSCode as per https://github.com/davefinster/coder/blob/master/official-vscode/Dockerfile and then build the real Coder container with https://github.com/davefinster/coder/blob/master/go/Dockerfile.

In my case I’m just installing the Go extensions.