Add CLI for remote dev

[ykafia]

Would be useful to just call VsCode remote dev directly through CLI like so :

code --remote-ssh Machine1

[WSLUser]

Better place to file is the the remote dev GitHub unless they've already said there's no API call for this.

[roblourens]

I think we have an issue for this somewhere but I can't find it...

[payonel]

just starting using remote ssh, this is the first thing i was looking for. I start all my projects and tools from command line, so this (for me) would be a very valuable feature!

[robertsk50]

If you want to open a specific file/folder on a remote machine you can use the uri command line functionality:

code --folder-uri vscode-remote://ssh-remote%2B<host><path>
or
code --file-uri vscode-remote://ssh-remote%2B<host><path>

[johnbillion]

How does this translate to a vscode://-style URI that can be opened via the browser? The vscode-remote:// protocol handler doesn't appear to be registered.

[bpasero]

microsoft/vscode#90367 suggests to introduce support for vscode://-style URIs in the form of: vscode://vscode-remote/<authority>/<path>

[aeschli]

Also already supported is the following:

code --remote ssh-remote+<remoteHost> <remotePath>

It's up to each remote extension to define the format for what's behind the +.
Ideally, ssh would spec what is valid in the documentation.

[bpasero]

This landed via microsoft/vscode@bdf1156. The URI must be of the form: <vscode|vscode-insiders>://<vscode-remote>/<authority>/<path> and will then internally be transformed to be <vscode-remote>://<authority>/<path>

[d2inco]

I am assuming the vscode-remote is the SSH target.... What key is the authority?

[bpasero]

Here is an example for SSH: vscode://vscode-remote/ssh-remote+<host>/<path>. Pretty much everything in vscode://vscode-remote is static and only afterwards is remote specific.

[bpasero]

Verification:

Craft a vscode-remote URI as outlined above and use the "Open Link" command to open it:

[connor4312]

I wasn't able to get this working. On the latest insiders I tried opening the link:

vscode-insiders://vscode-remote/ssh-remote+<ip>/home/connor

(as well as the non--insiders version)

However, nothing happened. I didn't see any error logs anywhere. Running Open Link on https://example.com works. The remote SSH extension is installed and I'm able to connect to the host manually.

[bpasero]

@connor4312 please clarify how you tried this and on what OS you are on.

[connor4312]

Okay, I got it working. Realized that the vscode URI, unlike the https link, was not recognized in the plain text language mode.

[svalentin]

Just to confirm, is there a way to open a remote file by URL? I only seem to get it to work with folders.
vscode://vscode-remote/ssh-remote+/<path/to/folder> works
vscode://vscode-remote/ssh-remote+/<path/to/file> tries to open the "folder" with the name of the file.

[bersbersbers]

@svalentin I just confirmed that it does work with workspace files, that is,
vscode://vscode-remote/ssh-remote+myhost/home/myuser/myproject.code-workspace
is working fine.

[svalentin]

Interesting. To me it behaved as if running vscode with code --folder-uri vscode-remote://<URI-to-file> when what I was looking for was something similar with running vscode with code --file-uri vscode-remote://<URI-to-file>.
Maybe I was doing something wrong.
I worked around it by registering my own URL handler that runs the above --file-uri command.