Visual Studio Code Server support in NixOS

Experimental support for VS Code Server in NixOS. The NodeJS by default supplied by VS Code cannot be used within NixOS due to missing hardcoded paths, so it is automatically replaced by a symlink to a compatible version of NodeJS that does work under NixOS.

Installation

NixOS module

You can add the module to your system in various ways. After the installation you'll have to manually enable the service for each user (see below).

Install as a tarball

{
  imports = [
    (fetchTarball "https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-vscode-server/tarball/master")
  ];

  services.vscode-server.enable = true;
}

Install as a flake

{
  inputs.vscode-server.url = "github:nix-community/nixos-vscode-server";

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, vscode-server }: {
    nixosConfigurations.yourhostname = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      modules = [
        vscode-server.nixosModules.default
        ({ config, pkgs, ... }: {
          services.vscode-server.enable = true;
        })
      ];
    };
  };
}

Enable the service

And then enable them for the relevant users:

systemctl --user enable auto-fix-vscode-server.service

You will see the following message:

The unit files have no installation config (WantedBy=, RequiredBy=, Also=,
Alias= settings in the [Install] section, and DefaultInstance= for template
units). This means they are not meant to be enabled using systemctl.

Possible reasons for having this kind of units are:
• A unit may be statically enabled by being symlinked from another unit's
  .wants/ or .requires/ directory.
• A unit's purpose may be to act as a helper for some other unit which has
  a requirement dependency on it.
• A unit may be started when needed via activation (socket, path, timer,
  D-Bus, udev, scripted systemctl call, ...).
• In case of template units, the unit is meant to be enabled with some
  instance name specified.

However you can safely ignore it. The service will start automatically after reboot once enabled, or you can just start it immediately yourself with:

systemctl --user start auto-fix-vscode-server.service

Enabling the user service creates a symlink to the Nix store, but the linked store path could be garbage collected at some point. One workaround to this particular issue is creating the following symlink:

ln -sfT /run/current-system/etc/systemd/user/auto-fix-vscode-server.service ~/.config/systemd/user/auto-fix-vscode-server.service

Home Manager

Put this code into your home-manager configuration i.e. in ~/.config/nixpkgs/home.nix:

{
  imports = [
    "${fetchTarball "https://github.com/msteen/nixos-vscode-server/tarball/master"}/modules/vscode-server/home.nix"
  ];

  services.vscode-server.enable = true;
}

Usage

When using VS Code as released by Microsoft without any special needs, just enabling and starting the service should be enough to make things work. If you have some custom build or needs, there are a few options available that might help you out.

`enable`

Whether to enable the service or not.

{
  services.vscode-server.enable = true;
}

`enableFHS`

A FHS compatible environment can be enabled to make binaries supplied by extensions work in NixOS without having to patch them. Note that this does come with downsides too, such as problematic support for SUID wrappers and terminals potentially behaving differently from a normal SSH connection, which is why it is not enabled by default.

{
  services.vscode-server.enableFHS = true;
}

`nodejsPackage`

By default VS code server will install the version of Node.js it needs, and this service will automatically patch it, but if you want to minimize disk space or want it to use some specific version of Node.js, you can specify which Nix package for Node.js it should use.

When enableFHS is set to true it will always require a Nix package for Node.js, but you are not required to set it, as it will default to the latest version used by VS Code.

Disclaimer: I am not a very active user of this extension and even NixOS (at the moment), so it can happen that the default is out of date. At least by having it as an option you can workaround it until the default get updated.

{
  services.vscode-server.nodejsPackage = pkgs.nodejs-16_x;
}

`extraRuntimeDependencies`

If you have an extension that requires a FHS compatible environment, but their binaries require dependencies that are not already included, you can add them here to make them available to the FHS environment.

This same list is also used to determine the RPATH when automatically patching the ELF binaries.

{
  services.vscode-server.extraRuntimeDependencies = pkgs: with pkgs; [
    curl
  ];
}

`installPath`

The installation path for VS Code server is configurable and the default can differ for alternative builds (e.g. oss and insider), so this option allows you to configure which installation path should be monitered and automatically fixed.

{
  services.vscode-server.installPath = "~/.vscode-server-oss";
}

`postPatch`

The goal of this project is to make VS Code server work with NixOS, anything more is outside of the scope of the project, but if you want additional things to be done, you can use this hook to run a shell script after the patching is done.

{
  services.vscode-server.postPatch = ''
    bin=$1
    bin_dir=${config.services.vscode-server.installPath}/bin/$bin
    # ...
  '';
}

Troubleshooting

This is not really an issue with this project per se, but with systemd user services in NixOS in general. After updating it can be necessary to first disable the service again:

systemctl --user disable auto-fix-vscode-server.service

This will remove the symlink to the old version. Then you can enable/start it again.

Connecting with SSH timed out

If the remote SSH session fails to start with this error:

Failed to connect to the remote extension host server (Error: Connecting with SSH timed out)

Try adding this to your VS Code settings json:

    "remote.SSH.useLocalServer": false,

Tested on VS Code version 1.63.2, connecting to the NixOS remote from a MacOS host.

Future work

Patching extensions

More work is needed to see if it is possible to also automatically patch binaries in VS Code extensions without using the FHS compatible environment.

WSL support

Some work has been done to get WSL to work out of the box, but it is not working quite yet.

License

VitalBio/nixos-vscode-server

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