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.
Get this by running apt-get install -y build-essential
rsync and unzip
Used for code-server releases
bats
Used to run script unit tests
Creating pull requests
Please create a GitHub Issue that
includes context for issues that you see. You can skip this if the proposed fix
is minor.
In your pull requests (PR), link to the issue that the PR solves.
Please ensure that the base of your PR is the main branch.
Commits and commit history
We prefer a clean commit history. This means you should squash all fixups and
fixup-type commits before asking for a review (e.g., clean up, squash, then force
push). If you need help with this, feel free to leave a comment in your PR, and
we'll guide you.
Development workflow
yarn
yarn watch
# Visit http://localhost:8080 once the build is completed.
yarn watch will live reload changes to the source.
Updates to VS Code
Updating VS Code requires git subtree. On some RPM-based Linux distros, git subtree is not included by default and needs to be installed separately. To
install, run dnf install git-subtree or yum install git-subtree.
To update VS Code:
Run yarn update:vscode.
Enter a version (e.g., 1.53)
This will open a draft pull request for you.
There will be merge conflicts. Commit them first, since it will be impossible
for us to review your PR if you don't.
Fix the conflicts. Then, test code-server locally to make sure everything
works.
Check the Node.js version that's used by Electron (which is shipped with VS
Code. If necessary, update your version of Node.js to match.
Watch for updates to
lib/vscode/src/vs/code/browser/workbench/workbench.html. You may need to
make changes to src/browser/pages/vscode.html.
Build
You can build as follows:
yarn build
yarn build:vscode
yarn release
Run your build:
cd release
yarn --production
# Runs the built JavaScript with Node.
node .
Build the release packages (make sure that you run yarn release first):
On Linux, the currently running distro will become the minimum supported
version. In our GitHub Actions CI, we use CentOS 7 for maximum compatibility.
If you need your builds to support older distros, run the build commands
inside a Docker container with all the build requirements installed.
Test
There are three kinds of tests in code-server:
Unit tests
Integration tests
End-to-end tests
Unit tests
Our unit tests are written in TypeScript and run using
Jest, the testing framework].
We use unit tests for functions and things that can be tested in isolation. The file structure is modeled closely after /src so it's easy for people to know where test files should live.
Integration tests
These are a work in progress. We build code-server and run a script called
test-standalone-release.sh, which
ensures that code-server's CLI is working.
Our integration tests look at components that rely on one another. For example,
testing the CLI requires us to build and package code-server.
End-to-end tests
The end-to-end (e2e) tests are written in TypeScript and run using
Playwright.
Before the e2e tests run, we run globalSetup, which eliminates the need to log
in before each test by preserving the authentication state.
Take a look at codeServer.test.ts to see how you would use it (see
test.use).
We also have a model where you can create helpers to use within tests. See
models/CodeServer.ts for an example.
Generally speaking, e2e means testing code-server while running in the browser
and interacting with it in a way that's similar to how a user would interact
with it. When running these tests with yarn test:e2e, you must have
code-server running locally. In CI, this is taken care of for you.
Structure
The code-server script serves as an HTTP API for login and starting a remote VS
Code process.
Most of the meaty parts are in the VS Code portion of the codebase under
lib/vscode, which we describe next.
Modifications to VS Code
In v1 of code-server, we had a patch of VS Code that split the codebase into a
front-end and a server. The front-end consisted of the UI code, while the server
ran the extensions and exposed an API to the front-end for file access and all
UI needs.
Over time, Microsoft added support to VS Code to run it on the web. They have
made the front-end open source, but not the server. As such, code-server v2 (and
later) uses the VS Code front-end and implements the server. We do this by using
a Git subtree to fork and modify VS Code. This code lives under
lib/vscode.
Some noteworthy changes in our version of VS Code include:
Adding our build file, lib/vscode/coder.js, which includes build steps specific to code-server
Removing azure/macOS signing related dependencies from build/package.json
Modifying .gitignore to allow us to add files to src/vs/server and modifying .eslintignore to ignore lint on the shared files below (we use different formatter settings than VS Code).
Sharing some files with our codebase via symlinks:
As the web portion of VS Code matures, we'll be able to shrink and possibly
eliminate our modifications. In the meantime, upgrading the VS Code version requires
us to ensure that our changes are still applied and work as intended. In the future,
we'd like to run VS Code unit tests against our builds to ensure that features
work as expected.
