Coder powers secure, scalable development across key industries — automotive, finance, government, and technology — enabling faster builds, tighter compliance, and seamless AI adoption in enterprise-grade cloud environments.
We keep code-server up to date with VS Code releases (there are usually two or
three a month) but we are not generally actively developing code-server aside
from fixing regressions.
Most of the work is keeping on top of issues and discussions.
Releasing
Check that the changelog lists all the important changes.
Make sure the changelog entry lists the current version of VS Code.
Go to GitHub Actions > Draft release > Run workflow on the commit you want to
release. For the version we match VS Code's minor and patch version. The
patch number may become temporarily out of sync if we need to put out a
patch, but if we make our own minor change then we will not release it until
the next minor VS Code release.
CI will build an NPM package and platform-specific packages, and upload those
to a draft release.
Update the resulting draft release with the changelog contents.
Publish the draft release after validating it.
Update the changelog with the release date and bump the Helm chart version
once the Docker images have published.
Merge the PR submitted to coder/code-server-aur repo.
Release Candidates
We prefer to do release candidates so the community can test things before a
full-blown release. To do this follow the same steps as above but:
Add a -rc.<number> suffix to the version.
When you publish the release select "pre-release". CI will not automatically
publish pre-releases.
Do not update the chart version or merge in the changelog until the final
release.
AUR
We publish to AUR as a package
here. This process is manual
and can be done by following the steps in this
repo.
Docker
We publish code-server as a Docker image
here, tagging it both with the
version and latest.
This is currently automated with the release process.
nixpkgs
We publish code-server in nixpkgs but it must be updated manually.
If you're ever looking to add more tests, here are a few ways to get started:
run npm run test:unit and look at the coverage chart. You'll see all the
uncovered lines. This is a good place to start.
look at test/scripts to see which scripts are tested. We can always use more
tests there.
look at test/e2e. We can always use more end-to-end tests.
Otherwise, talk to a current maintainer and ask which part of the codebase is
lacking most when it comes to tests.
Documentation
Troubleshooting
Our docs are hosted on Vercel. Vercel only shows logs in
realtime, which means you need to have the logs open in one tab and reproduce
your error in another tab. Since our logs are private to Coder the organization,
you can only follow these steps if you're a Coder employee. Ask a maintainer for
help if you need it.
Taking a real scenario, let's say you wanted to troubleshoot this docs
change. Here is how you would
do it:
