Visual Studio Code Remote SSH: Tips, Tricks and Troubleshooting
This blog post is a tutorial on how to use vscode remote ssh to connect to a remote server. It will cover the basic tips, tricks and troubleshooting techniques.
I recently started using Visual Studio Code as my IDE for Python programming. One of the best features of it is being able to use remote-ssh plugin to connect to a remote server and edit files in the server. I have been doing this for the past one month after moving from atom to vscode. In this blog post, I will share some tips and tricks that I have learnt while working with it. I hope it will be helpful for you too.
What is VSCode Remote SSH?
VSCode Remote SSH allows you to 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.
You can even install extensions into your remote environment! You can do all of this within VS Code without ever switching over to a dedicated terminal application like PuTTY or iTerm2.
In simple words, VS code will allow you to edit files remotely in your local system from a remote server over ssh just like
The Visual Studio Code has many features that make coding fun and easy. One of the most prominent features is the Remote-Development extensions. This allows you to connect to remote servers and work on them, directly from the IDE. In this article, we will discuss how we can use ssh to connect to a remote system from Linux, Windows, and Mac.
What is an SSH Connection?
SSH stands for Secure Shell. It is used to connect to a remote server and transfer the data back and forth. It was created as an open-source alternative for Telnet which sends all the traffic in plain text format (which means it can be easily read by any eavesdropper).
Unlike Telnet, SSH uses encryption to secure the data being transmitted over the connection.
Visual Studio Code has been one of the most powerful code editors/IDEs available to developers. It is open-source and available for Windows, Linux and macOS. Recently, Microsoft has added a new extension to its Visual Studio Code extensions store that helps you remotely connect to any Linux machine using SSH protocol.
The Remote Development Extension Pack allows you to connect to a remote machine or VM using SSH, develop on it and run it directly from the VS Code window. This blog will guide you through the setup steps:
1. Install the extension pack
2. Start an SSH session from vscode
3. Configure your IDE preferences
4. Debug your code remotely
The problem:
You want to connect to a remote system from your current system.
The usual solution is to use SSH to connect to the remote system and then work with what you have on the remote system. However, you can also run VSCode Remote over SSH, which means you are using SSH to remotely connect to a computer that has VSCode installed.
Prerequisites:
VSCode needs to be installed on your local machine and the remote machine. You must have an SSH client installed on your local machine so that you can make the connection. The SSH client is already built into Linux and MacOS. For Windows, you can use Putty or WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) as your SSH client.
To use this method, you must be able to establish an SSH connection from your local machine to the remote machine where VSCode is running.
Instructions:
1) Make sure VSCode is running on the remote computer. You should see something like this when running the “Remote-SSH: Connect to Host” command in VSCode:
Remote-ssh user@remote_computer_ip_address:/home/user
2) From the menu bar, click “View”, then ”
Visual Studio Code Remote Development has prerequisites for the specific host / container / WSL distribution you will be connecting to.
For example, if you want to connect to a remote server, you need to install the Remote – SSH extension. Installing extensions on your local computer does not modify the tools or packages on the remote computer.
The Remote – SSH extension installs in two parts:
A Visual Studio Code extension (the Microsoft.vscode-remote.ssh package). This is what enables Visual Studio Code to communicate with a remote system running an OpenSSH server over SSH (Secure Shell). The OpenSSH server must be installed and configured on the remote system. The OpenSSH server is already included in many Linux distributions and there is no need for installation or configuration on those platforms. For Windows systems, see the Remote – SSH Installation Guide for Windows.
A command-line client that runs on your local machine (the ssh command). This client is typically already installed in most Unix-based operating systems, such as macOS and Linux distributions and needs no further configuration on those platforms. For Windows systems, see the Remote – SSH Installation Guide for Windows.
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If you are a developer who works on multiple machines, having a reliable way to connect to your machines is critical. You need an SSH client that can be used to access your remote servers. We will look at the three major operating systems and how to configure them with VSCode.
VSCode Remote SSH on MacOS:
If you are a developer who works on multiple machines, having a reliable way to connect to your machines is critical. You need an SSH client that can be used to access your remote servers. We will look at the three major operating systems and how to configure them with VSCode.
VSCode Remote SSH on MacOS:
You can set up your system by installing the following command line tools:
1) Install vscode command line utility
code
2) Install ssh-copy-id command line utility
brew install ssh-copy-id
3) Install rsync command line utility
brew install rsync
Recently, I started using Visual Studio Code editor for our programming and development tasks. Despite being one of the most popular text editors, I have never used it before. As a long time user of Vim editor, I was looking for something similar that can let me use the same set of commands from my favorite editor on Windows as well.
After trying a few extensions and settings, I finally managed to figure out how to do that. In this tutorial, we will learn how to use Visual Studio Code for remote development on Linux systems (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS).