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Kai Walter
Kai Walter

Posted on • Updated on

Automate VS Code extensions setup across profiles

Motivation

I now work with Visual Studio Code for several years in many different workloads:

  • Azure scripting in Azure CLI and PowerShell
  • .NET development
  • Python development
  • Go development
  • Bash scripting
  • ...

With that I collected a number of extensions in Visual Studio Code - before writing this article : 53 - which makes startup of VS Code slow, especially when I already have a lot of going on on my machine and much more so with the machine behind the corporate let-inspect-just-everything proxy.

When learning about VS Code profiles I thought that I could create an utility that helps me setup extensions tailored to my various editing workloads.

Prerequisites

I did not yet figure out how to manage profiles programmatically, hence before running the script the profiles touched by the script need to be created first:

Visual Studio Code profiles that need to be created before running the sample script

Automation Script

This bare bone script (no checkings, no safety nets) is capable of removing installed extensions on all profiles specified and then install extensions for those profiles:

param(
    [string] $ProfilePattern = ".*",
    [switch] $Clear,
    [switch] $Install
)

$config = @{
    "Default" = @("humao.rest-client")
    "pwsh"    = @("ms-vscode.powershell")
    "py"      = @("ms-python.python")
    "az"      = @("humao.rest-client", "ms-vscode.azure-account", "ms-vscode.azurecli")
    "dotnet"  = @("humao.rest-client", "ms-dotnettools.csharp")
}

if ($Clear) {
    foreach ($p in ($config.Keys | ? { $_ -match $ProfilePattern })) {
        Write-Host "clear profile" $p
        code --profile $p --list-extensions | % { code --profile $p --uninstall-extension $_ --force }
    }
}

if ($Install) {
    foreach ($p in ($config.Keys | ? { $_ -match $ProfilePattern })) {
        Write-Host "install profile" $p "extensions"
        foreach ($e in $config[$p]) {
            code --profile $p --install-extension $e --force
        }
    }
}
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Usage

setupVSCodeExtensions.ps1 -Clear remove extensions for all specified profiles
setupVSCodeExtensions.ps1 -Install install extensions on all specified profiles
setupVSCodeExtensions.ps1 -Clear -Install remove and then install extensions on all specified profiles
setupVSCodeExtensions.ps1 -Clear -Install -ProfilePattern "pwsh" remove and then install extensions for pwsh profile

Note on Settings Sync

As I have settings sync activated on all my VS Code instances, above setup was synchronized from my Windows box configuration, where I originally ran the script, to my other Windows and Linux boxes and VMs.

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