VSCode Remote – SSH
Code Better by Connecting to Your Favorite Cloud IDE using Custom Credentials
The latest version of Visual Studio Code, 1.42 allows you to connect to remote machines over SSH or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and develop websites from the comfort of your favorite Cloud IDEs. You can learn more about this feature on our blog.
Once you install the extension, you can connect to your favorite cloud IDE using custom credentials.
Some of the popular cloud IDEs that support this feature include Gitpod, Theia IDE, and Eclipse Che. To learn more about creating custom credentials for these IDEs, please refer to the documentation below:
GitPod: Connect to Gitpod using custom credentials
Theia IDE: Connect to Theia IDE using custom credentials
Eclipse Che: Connect to Eclipse Che using custom credentials
Visual Studio Code Remote Development allows you to use a container, remote machine, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as a full-featured development environment. This enables you to work on a remote computer, such as a server, an Azure virtual machine (VM), or a Raspberry Pi, from the comfort of your local Windows PC, using all the familiar VS Code UI and workflows.
With Remote – SSH, we can bring this capability to all of our target machines regardless of operating system. Remote – SSH will open an SSH connection to your remote machine and give you full VS Code editor capabilities with SFTP file synchronization. You can edit files and run commands in the integrated terminal to work with your code and tools remotely just as if you were right next to the remote computer.
In this blog post we will explore how we can leverage Remote – SSH for connecting to cloud IDEs such as Cloud9 or Koding. In particular, we will see how you can customize the SSH connection by providing specific credentials through SSH configuration files.
Coders are creative people and they like to customize how they work. As a coder, you may have your preferred IDE in a cloud environment that you use to connect and code remotely. If so, VS Code Remote – SSH lets you open a remote folder on any remote machine, virtual machine, or container with a running SSH server and take full advantage of VS Code’s feature set.
The main benefit of using VS Code Remote – SSH extension is that you can work on remote projects from one place locally by connecting to the SSH hosts right inside Visual Studio Code itself. This extension uses the OpenSSH protocol for authentication.
If you are a developer, chances are that you work with remote servers on a daily basis. You may be already using SSH to connect to these servers. But what if we could go one step further and use Visual Studio Code (VSCode) to develop applications on these remote machines?
Visual Studio Code allows us to do just that through its Remote Development extensions. Using the Remote-SSH extension, we can develop applications remotely in containers, on VMs, or even on physical machines.
In this article, I explain the basics of how the Remote-SSH extension works and show you how you can start developing with VSCode over SSH.
The Visual Studio Code team has published a blog post on using remote extensions with the Remote Development extensions. The post shows you how to set up your SSH config files and use them in VS Code.
The Remote Development extensions let you use VS Code with a remote machine or container. These extensions can run commands and other extensions directly on the remote machine, which means you also get full language support as well as access to debuggers, etc.
With the release of Remote – SSH, we’re working hard to improve the developer’s inner loop by enabling you to connect to a remote machine and work with files as if they were stored on your local machine. What’s even better is that you can use all of your favorite extensions, including Python, C++, Java, Go, PHP, and more.
In this post, we’ll walk through how to get started with Remote – SSH in Visual Studio Code:
Configuring your SSH client
Connecting to an SSH host
Working with files on a remote machine
Using extensions on a remote machine