List of required extensions for project

[outcoldman]

Proposal

Allow projects to specify list of recommended/required extensions.

Proposed solution

For example, vscode may have in the .vscode/settings.json

{
    "extensions.extendedConfigurations": {
         "chrome.debugger": {
             "required": True
         }
    }
}

When user will open this project - he will see a message if extension has not been installed

Current project recommend you to install chrome.debugger extension (tasks, debugger or syntax may depend on this extension). Do you want to install it?

[jrieken]

@outcoldman Actually there is an extension for this. We should consider promoting that.

[skolmer]

@jrieken for my usecase #6178 it would be crucial to have this as a core feature of vscode

[jrieken]

makes sense. it's something we like and don't hear the first time.

[webstp]

+1, This was my inspiration for writing this extension. Unfortunately I have not been able to dedicate a lot of time towards this. I have been working up updating this code. What I am realizing is I need to duplicate a lot of vscode functionality when it comes to extension installation. I would be nice to have this as a core feature (let me know if I can help), or at least provide a way to hook into the extension services (gallery/manager/etc) through an API to allow this type of workflow

[mjbvz]

I believe this feature was added in VSCode 1.6: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_6#_workspace-extension-recommendations

You can now create a .vscode/extensions.json file that defines which extensions should be installed for a project:

{
    "recommendations": [
        "eg2.tslint",
        "dbaeumer.vscode-eslint",
        "msjsdiag.debugger-for-chrome"
    ]
}

VSCode will prompt you to install these extensions if they are not already installed.

[jcrben]

It seems there is no way to automatically create a list of installed extensions, which can help me keep my dotfiles in sync? So I'll have to run --list-extensions and put that in my repo whenever I add a new extension?

[Telokis]

@mjbvz How does this behave when switching betwee. Two projects recommending different extensions? Will it properly disable "auto" installed extensions and enable them back if I come back ti the original project?
What about a way to automatically update this file as denoted by @jcrben this is quite painful to handle manually.

[mjbvz]

@Telokis All extensions are currently installed globally. You can then disable the extensions in individual workspaces but I do not believe this will be done automatically. #347 tracks support for workspace specific extensions

[mjbvz]

@jcrben Can you explain your use case? I don't think you should have to be updating the extensions.json file that often.

code --list-extensions --show-versions is the way to list installed extensions. It should be easy enough to create a simple script that parses the output from this command and creates a extensions.json file if you need this functionality

[jcrben]

I don't want to have to run a command get a list of installed extensions. I want my installed extensions automatically synced into my dotfiles repository... anyhow it's not a big deal right now