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Jonathan Carter
Jonathan Carter

Posted on • Updated on

VS Code: Does your team or school use a custom “extension pack” to share their tooling stack?

Hey All!

I’ve noticed a trend where teams and/or schools will create a VS Code extension pack, and use that to simplify the acquisition of all extensions needed to work on a project or curriculum (e.g. LBCC CS Pack, Boundary Studio). That way, it’s easy for everyone to get started (you simply install the pack), and stay consistent as new extensions are added/removed.

Has your team/school done this? If so, could you share the extension pack you use? I’m curious to see how folks are using this method, and also, hear whether it’s worked well as a means of sharing a standard tooling stack (as compared to, or complimented by recommended extensions). Thanks! 🙏

Top comments (11)

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charlesanim profile image
Charles Anim

There's a great article here on how to do this.

medium.com/@sanik.bajracharya/vsco...

Also be sure to do npm i -g vsce to package your extension pack

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lostintangent profile image
Jonathan Carter

Thanks for the link! I just updated the text to reference this article.

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omrisama profile image
Omri Gabay

That community college professor has a standardized extension pack for his students using VSCode? Wow. That's so dope.

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lostintangent profile image
Jonathan Carter

That’s what I thought as well 😁

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dsample profile image
Duncan Sample

We haven't created extension packs yet, but a number of teams have started putting .vscode/extensions.json files in their repos, so at least people are prompted to install a bunch. Each team has the autonomy to work differently, so we haven't standardised on a set of extensions for everyone yet.

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shanalikhan profile image
Shan Khan

Why use custom extension Pack when you can share your settings using Settings Sync extension :)

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lostintangent profile image
Jonathan Carter

Interesting! So you have multiple developers using the same Gist to sync extensions amongst themselves? I've seen the extension pack method used to synchronize a curated set of extensions amongst a team, that's focused on team-relevant extensions as opposed to user-specific personalizations/preferences.

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shanalikhan profile image
Shan Khan

Yes, the GitHub Gist will be shared amoung developers and the owner can only push into the gist allowing the users lists to download the settings.

Read post here:

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angeliquejw profile image
Angelique

Super timely info, as I didn't know you could do this and my web dev class meets for the first time this week! I'll return and share the link to my pack soon 👍

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angeliquejw profile image
Angelique • Edited

Actually, publishing this was easy! This is the extension pack I made for my students learning HTML and CSS this semester: marketplace.visualstudio.com/items...

Haven't gone so far as to publish it on the marketplace, but this is the extension pack my students are using this semester for intro to HTML + CSS: github.com/mica-web/vs-code-ext

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Serdar Oztetik

Just to be clear, it installs the required/expected vscode extensions but it cannot install the actual dependencies of a project right?