VS Code Barebones Extension

This is an example of the most minimal VS Code extension I was able to develop.

It consists of two files in tomashubelbauer.extension: index.js and package.json.

The tomashubelbauer.extension subdirectory exists because VS Code has a CLI switch for configuring a directory from which to run extensions and it treats subdirectories of this directory as extensions. This directory groups the files making up the barebones extension.

index.js is the entry point and the implementation of the extension logic. At current, it displays the extension name and version number using the VS Code API window.showInformationMessage.

package.json is the required manifest in its most barebones form possible:

• name is required
• version is required and must be semver-compatible, 0.0.0 works
• publisher is required but can be empty
• main seems to be required, I couldn't get it to default to index.js :-(
• engines/vscode is required, but at least it will accept >0.0.0
• activationEvents is required, I used onStartupFinished but * works, too

I tried using "type": "module" in package.json and ESM syntax in index.js, but VS Code does not seem to support that.

I made this for fun. I might actually migrate my extensions to this, though, as I dislike using code generators (yo code).

Running

code --extensions-dir ${.}

Replace ${.} with the path of this repository directory.

Testing

To not have testing and developing mess with up your VS Code instance, open up a terminal window in the repository directory and alternate these two commands as needed:

• node . to test/run the code
• code . to open the repository directory in VS Code

Publishing

I haven't actually published any extension using this method yet. I know it will require tweaking to support publishing, the VS Code Marrketplace has checks in place to make sure extensions contain some metadata VS Code does not enforce.

If I ever do publish an extension using this method, I'll update this to show how I did it. Most likely the process will require using vsce package to pack the extension directory up to a VSIX archive and then vsce publish to submit the extension to the VS Code Marketplace.

To-Do

Figure out why the index.log file is empty in CI - extension not working

This also reproduces locally so it might be easier to debug this way. To repro, run ubuntu, then cd to /mnt/…/vscode-barebones-extension and run node . (make sure you have a recent version of Node and Code installed). This will show the temporary directory path as expected, but running /mnt/…/index.log will print an empty file. node . does not seem to run the extension and update the file.

Transfer over the currently working logic from code-extension-screencast

https://github.com/TomasHubelbauer/code-extension-screencast

Need to figure out how to simplify the extension runner to work with this.