Workshop — VS Code Extension

Develop inside Workshop containers directly from VS Code. Workshop launches LXD system containers with Ubuntu from simple YAML definitions checked into your project, giving each project a clean, reproducible environment that the whole team shares.

Requirements

• OS: Ubuntu 22.04 or later
• Architecture: amd64 or arm64
• LXD from the 6/stable channel:

  sudo snap refresh lxd --channel=6/stable
  

• Workshop 0.9.5 or later:

  snap install workshop --classic
  

• Remote - SSH, installed automatically as a dependency

Getting Started

1. Open a terminal in your project directory and initialise a workshop:

   workshop init dev --sdks opencode,go/1.26/stable
   

   This creates a .workshop/dev.yaml definition. Adjust the SDK list to match your stack - see Reference SDKs for the full catalogue of SDKs maintained by Canonical.

2. Open the project folder in VS Code. A Workshop panel appears in the Activity Bar.

3. Click Reopen in Workshop next to your workshop in the panel (or run Workshop: Reopen in Workshop from the Command Palette). VS Code reconnects inside the container.

To return to your local window at any time, click Reopen Locally in the Workshop panel or in the Remote indicator in the status bar.

Restricted Mode

When VS Code opens a folder in Restricted Mode (untrusted workspace), most extensions, including this one, are disabled, which prevents using the Workshop panel to reconnect or reopen locally.

To allow this extension to run even in untrusted workspaces, add the following to your user settings.json (Ctrl+Shift+P → Open User Settings (JSON)):

{
  "extensions.supportUntrustedWorkspaces": {
    "canonical.workshop": {
      "supported": true
    }
  }
}

With this in place, the Workshop panel remains active in restricted mode so you can open the project in a workshop sandbox and continue not trusting it on the host.

Development

This project uses Workshop for its development environment:

workshop launch
workshop connect ext/test-deps:desktop

Open the project in VS Code and press F5 to start an Extension Development Host.

Useful commands:

workshop run -- test
workshop run -- build