Visual Studio Code configuration

The standard CITS3007 development environment VM comes with the vim editor already installed, but many people find it more comfortable developing and debugging code using a graphical editor.

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) works well on Windows, Mac and Linux computers, and allows you to seamlessly write and debug code on a Vagrant VM.

The following steps should be done on your host machine (i.e. your laptop). You will need to have a CITS3007 development environment VM already running (e.g. through invoking the vagrant up command).

Install VS Code by downloading it from https://code.visualstudio.com.
Start VS Code (on Linux or MacOS, the command to do so from the terminal is just code), and from the menu select ‘File’ / ‘Preferences’ / ‘Extensions’. In the search box at the top left of the window, type remote ssh and hit enter. The top hit should be the “Remote - SSH” extension; select it, then click the “install” button.

In the lower left corner of the window you should see a button with facing angle bracket symbols (“><”) – click on it:
VS Code will then offer several options – select “Open SSH configuration file”.

Select the first configuration file VS Code suggests and open it.
Now, in the terminal window from which you started the Vagrant VM (that is – on your host machine or laptop), type vagrant ssh-config.
Troubleshooting

Note that vagrant commands need to be run from the host machine, not from within a VM. If your terminal prompt looks like this:
```
vagrant@cits3007-ubuntu2004:~$
```
then your terminal is currently connect to a VM. You need to either exit or switch to a new terminal in order to issue vagrant commands.
Vagrant will output configuration settings which can be used with ssh – something like the following:
```
Host default
  HostName 127.0.0.1
  User vagrant
  Port 2200
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  PasswordAuthentication no
  IdentityFile /home/smithj/cits3007-test/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  LogLevel FATAL
```
Paste this ssh configuration into the file which is open in VS Code, and save it. You may want to change the first line from Host default to something more informative, like Host cits3007-test.

Pasting this configuration informs VS Code about the new VM and how to connect to it.
If you again click on the “remote window” button in the lower left corner of VS Code, one of the options is “Connect to Host”, and if you select that, one of the options should be the new VM you specified (e.g. cits3007-test).

VS Code will open a new window (and spend a few seconds setting up some software on the VM): in this window, you can use VS Code as normal, but all files you can access will be on the virtual machine.