code-server/docs/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

• Pull Requests
  • Commits
• Requirements
• Development Workflow
  • Updating VS Code
    • Notes about Changes
• Build
• Structure
  • Modifications to VS Code
  • Currently Known Issues

• Detailed CI and build process docs

Pull Requests

Please create a GitHub Issue to address any issue. You can skip this if the proposed fix is minor.

In your Pull Requests (PR), link to the issue that the PR solves.

Please ensure that the base of your PR is the main branch.

Commits

We prefer a clean commit history. This means you should squash all fixups and fixup-type commits before asking for review (cleanup, squash, force-push). If you need help with this, feel free to leave a comment in your PR and we'll guide you.

Requirements

The prerequisites for contributing to code-server are almost the same as those for VS Code. There are several differences, however. Here is what is needed:

• node v14.x or greater
• git v2.x or greater
• yarn
  • used to install JS packages and run scripts
• nfpm
  • used to build .deb and .rpm packages
• jq
  • used to build code-server releases
• gnupg
  • all commits must be signed and verified
  • see GitHub's "Managing commit signature verification" or follow this tutorial
• build-essential (Linux)
  • apt-get install -y build-essential - used by VS Code
• rsync and unzip
  • used for code-server releases

Development Workflow

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

yarn watch will live reload changes to the source.

Updating VS Code

Updating VS Code requires git subtree. On some rpm-based Linux distros, git subtree is not included by default, and needs to be installed separately. To install, run dnf install git-subtree or yum install git-subtree as necessary.

To update VS Code, follow these steps:

1. Run yarn update:vscode.
2. Enter a version. Ex. 1.53
3. This will open a draft PR for you.
4. There will be merge conflicts. First commit them.
   1. We do this because if we don't, it will be impossible to review your PR.
5. Once they're all fixed, test code-server locally and make sure it all works.
6. Check the version of Node.js that the version of Electron shipped with VSCode uses, and update the version of Node.js if necessary.

Notes about Changes

• watch out for updates to lib/vscode/src/vs/code/browser/workbench/workbench.html. You may need to make changes to src/browser/pages/vscode.html

Build

You can build using:

yarn build
yarn build:vscode
yarn release

Run your build with:

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

Build the release packages (make sure that you run yarn release first):

yarn release:standalone
yarn test:standalone-release
yarn package

NOTE: On Linux, the currently running distro will become the minimum supported version. In our GitHub Actions CI, we use CentOS 7 for maximum compatibility. If you need your builds to support older distros, run the build commands inside a Docker container with all the build requirements installed.

Structure

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

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

Most of the meaty parts are in the VS Code portion of the codebase under lib/vscode, which we described next.

Modifications to VS Code

In v1 of code-server, we had a patch of VS Code that split the codebase into a front-end and a server. The front-end consisted of all UI code, while the server ran the extensions and exposed an API to the front-end for file access and all UI needs.

Over time, Microsoft added support to VS Code to run it on the web. They have made the front-end open source, but not the server. As such, code-server v2 (and later) uses the VS Code front-end and implements the server. We do this by using a git subtree to fork and modify VS Code. This code lives under lib/vscode.

Some noteworthy changes in our version of VS Code:

• Adding our build file, which includes our code and VS Code's web code
• Allowing multiple extension directories (both user and built-in)
• Modifying 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)
• Sending client-side telemetry through the server
• Allowing modification of the display language
• Making it possible for us to load code on the client
• Making it possible to install extensions of any kind
• Fixing issue with getting disconnected when your machine sleeps or hibernates
• Adding connection type to web socket query parameters

As the web portion of VS Code matures, we'll be able to shrink and possibly eliminate our modifications. In the meantime, upgrading the VS Code version requires us to ensure that our changes are still applied and work as intended. In the future, we'd like to run VS Code unit tests against our builds to ensure that features work as expected.

Note: We have extension docs on the CI and build system.

If the functionality you're working on does NOT depend on code from VS Code, please move it out and into code-server.

Currently Known Issues

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