Contributing

Requirements
Development Workflow
Build
Structure
- VS Code Patch

Detailed CI and build process docs

Requirements

Please refer to VS Code's prerequisites.

Differences:

We require a minimum of node v12 but later versions should work.
We use fnpm to build .deb and .rpm packages.
We use jq to build code-server releases.
The CI container is a useful reference for all our dependencies.

Development Workflow

yarn
yarn vscode
yarn watch
# Visit http://localhost:8080 once the build completed.

To develop inside of an isolated docker container:

./ci/dev/image/exec.sh

root@12345:/code-server# yarn
root@12345:/code-server# yarn vscode
root@12345:/code-server# yarn watch

Any changes made to the source will be live reloaded.

If changes are made to the patch and you've built previously you must manually reset VS Code then run yarn vscode:patch.

Build

yarn
yarn vscode
yarn build
yarn build:vscode
yarn release
cd release
yarn --production
# Runs the built JavaScript with Node.
node .

Now you can build release packages with:

yarn release:standalone
# The standalone release is in ./release-standalone
yarn test:standalone-release
yarn package
# .deb, .rpm and the standalone archive are in ./release-packages

Structure

The code-server script serves an HTTP API to login and start a remote VS Code process.

The CLI code is in ./src/node and the HTTP routes are implemented in ./src/node/app.

Most of the meaty parts are in our VS Code patch which is described next.

VS Code Patch

Back in v1 of code-server, we had an extensive patch of VS Code that split the codebase into a frontend and server. The frontend consisted of all UI code and the server ran the extensions and exposed an API to the frontend for file access and everything else that the UI needed.

This worked but eventually Microsoft added support to VS Code to run it in the web. They have open sourced the frontend but have kept the server closed source.

So in interest of piggy backing off their work, v2 and beyond use the VS Code web frontend and fill in the server. This is contained in our ./ci/dev/vscode.patch under the path src/vs/server.

Other notable changes in our patch include:

Add our own build file which includes our code and VS Code's web code.
Allow multiple extension directories (both user and built-in).
Modify the loader, websocket, webview, service worker, and asset requests to use the URL of the page as a base (and TLS if necessary for the websocket).
Send client-side telemetry through the server.
Allow modification of the display language.
Make it possible for us to load code on the client.
Make extensions work in the browser.
Make it possible to install extensions of any kind.
Fix getting permanently disconnected when you sleep or hibernate for a while.
Add connection type to web socket query parameters.

Some known issues presently:

Creating custom VS Code extensions and debugging them doesn't work.
Extension profiling and tips are currently disabled.

As the web portion of VS Code matures, we'll be able to shrink and maybe even entirely eliminate our patch. In the meantime, however, upgrading the VS Code version requires ensuring that the patch still applies and has the intended effects.

To generate a new patch run yarn vscode:diff.

note: We have extension docs on the CI and build system at ./ci/README.md

If functionality doesn't depend on code from VS Code then it should be moved into code-server otherwise it should be in the patch.

In the future we'd like to run VS Code unit tests against our builds to ensure features work as expected.

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