Support a local dev experience for extensions browsing

[timheuer]

I feel like the VSCode shell could also enable this feature without marketplace. The pattern I'd love to see is simple and mirrors the concept of local NuGet galleries in the .NET ecosystem.

Scenario:

• Enable VSCode marketplace (via setting) to add other 'endpoints' -- this could be as simple as a folder, as advanced as owning an API, etc -- although I don't think that fully is needed.
• VSCode would look at that directory and expect it to just be a directory of well-structured VSIX packages and enumerate those in the marketplace view in VSCode
• The marketplace view would show a grouping of these items using the path name as the title (could get long so some concatenation)
  This would be a lighter 'private marketplace' and would allow a good/rapid local dev experience for these workflows

[isidorn]

@timheuer thanks for opening this. Let's use this issue to get more feedback, and we might tackle this in the future.

[GitMensch]

Note: currently there are multiple URL endpoints already to provide the marketplace experience, which are defined in product.json:

		extensionsGallery: {
			serviceUrl: env['VSCODE_GALLERY_SERVICE_URL'] || serviceUrl,
			cacheUrl: env['VSCODE_GALLERY_CACHE_URL'] || cacheUrl,
			itemUrl: env['VSCODE_GALLERY_ITEM_URL'] || itemUrl,
			controlUrl: env['VSCODE_GALLERY_CONTROL_URL'] || controlUrl,
			recommendationsUrl: env['VSCODE_GALLERY_RECOMMENDATIONS_URL'] || recommendationsUrl

Note: that is part of #129764 which allows to override these via environment variables and also to "merge" the distributed package.json with a user/project specific one; both options would be usable for "local experience" as soon as those URLs may also point to a folder (with the suggested "just lookup in the file system").

I personally think that a "simple" lookup here is enough, vscode would only unpack product.json from the vsix and have all the "real" names and metadata available that it would have in the marketplace - so even searching would work fine.

[GitMensch]

Until this is ready (it was requested since May 2017 so that may be "quite long") you could use https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=zokugun.vsix-manager, which allows to place extensions in a folder. To use this you'll then either copy the content of this extension (just unzip it and move everything from "extension" into its root folder) to your vscode installation under extensions (it will be handled as an inbuilt extension then) or run once code --install-extension zokugun.vsix-manager-*.vsix to have it installed.Then start vscode and either configure the local folder (where you possibly keep the extension itself, too) or use this from a previous installation (as it is a user setting).

Thinking of this: the easiest solution to this problem would be to just integrate this extension by default...