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Discovery with VS Code

Want to edit files directly from VSCode? There is a way to do that.

Introduction to VS Code​

VS Code is a source code editor developed by Microsoft. Not only that it has powerful editing capabilities including IntelliSense code completion and debugging, it can be customized by installing third-party extensions, allowing the users to boost their developer experiences. It is an Electron based application, meaning that it is built based on the web technologies such as JavaScript and Node.js. You can read more on the VS Code official documentation.

Installing VS Code​

VS Code is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

https://code.visualstudio.com/

Setting up SSH config for login node​

See here for detailed instructions. For the Discovery login node, the configuration in ~/.ssh/config would be something like

Host discovery
    HostName login.discovery.neu.edu
    user john
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Installing extensions on VS Code​

Go to the "Extensions" tab (an icon with blocks) in the activity bar (the bar on the very left). Search for and install the following extensions.

Connecting from VS Code​

Go to the "Remote Explorer" (with a PC monitor icon) in the activity bar (the bar on the very left). A panel with a list of servers will appear on the window's left side. The servers listed here are the hosts you have configured in the ~/.ssh/config file.

Once you have located the server to which you would like to connect (it could be a login node or a computing node), click the arrow button to start a session.