Substrate for Visual Studio Code

Full-featured editor support for Substrate phylum development — the ELPS Lisp dialect used to write Hyperledger Fabric chaincode business logic.

Features

Syntax Highlighting

Rich TextMate grammar covering all ELPS forms plus substrate-specific extensions:

• Definitions: defun, defmacro, deftype, defconst, lambda, let/let*
• Substrate endpoints: defendpoint, defendpointnames
• Substrate builtins: route-success, route-failure
• Qualified calls: statedb:get, cc:warnf, sidedb:put, crypto:sha256, etc.
• Literals: strings, numbers, keywords, booleans, nil

Language Server (LSP)

Powered by shirotester lsp, which boots a full substrate runtime including all Go-registered builtins:

• Completions for cc:*, statedb:*, sidedb:*, crypto:*, elpspath:*, connector:*, batch:*, and all ELPS standard library symbols
• Hover documentation for 500+ symbols
• Go to definition and find references
• Diagnostics (lint errors, undefined symbols, arity mismatches)
• Document symbols and workspace symbols
• Format on save via elps fmt

Debugger (DAP)

Step-through debugging with shirotester debug:

• Breakpoints (line and conditional)
• Step in/over/out
• Variable inspection including statedb and private data collection scopes
• REPL via debug console

Installation

Install from the VS Code Marketplace.

The extension bundles the shirotester binary for macOS and Linux (x64 and arm64). No additional installation is required.

Using a custom binary

If you need a specific version of shirotester, set the path in your settings:

{
  "substrate.path": "/path/to/shirotester"
}

The extension searches for the binary in this order:

1. substrate.path setting (if configured)
2. Bundled binary (platform-specific package)
3. $GOBIN/shirotester
4. $GOPATH/bin/shirotester
5. ~/go/bin/shirotester
6. ~/.local/bin/shirotester
7. /usr/local/bin/shirotester
8. /opt/homebrew/bin/shirotester
9. shirotester on PATH

Settings

Debug Configuration

Add to .vscode/launch.json:

{
  "version": "0.2.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "type": "substrate",
      "request": "launch",
      "name": "Debug Substrate",
      "program": "${file}",
      "stopOnEntry": true
    }
  ]
}

Attach to a running DAP server

{
  "type": "substrate",
  "request": "attach",
  "name": "Attach to Substrate",
  "host": "localhost",
  "port": 4711
}

Developing

Building and testing locally

# From the substrate repo root:

# Build shirotester into the extension's bin directory
go build -o editors/vscode/bin/shirotester ./cmd/shirotester

# Build the extension
cd editors/vscode
npm install
npm run build

# Run grammar tests
npm test

# Package a platform-specific vsix
npx vsce package --target darwin-arm64 --allow-missing-repository

Installing / uninstalling for local testing

# Install the locally-built vsix
code --install-extension substrate-darwin-arm64-0.1.0.vsix

# Uninstall
code --uninstall-extension luthersystems.substrate

# Verify
code --list-extensions | grep substrate

After installing, reload VS Code (Cmd+Shift+P → "Reload Window") to pick up the new extension.

Debugging a phylum

To use the substrate debugger, create .vscode/launch.json with "type": "substrate":

{
  "version": "0.2.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "type": "substrate",
      "request": "launch",
      "name": "Debug Substrate",
      "program": "${file}",
      "stopOnEntry": true
    }
  ]
}

Without a launch.json, VS Code may prompt you to install the ELPS extension instead — the "type": "substrate" field tells VS Code to use this extension's debugger.

Cleanup test artifacts

rm -f substrate-*.vsix bin/shirotester

About Luther Systems

Our mission is to accelerate the advent of the automated enterprise. Founded by a team who spent years automating complex processes for some of the world's largest financial institutions, Luther Systems builds platforms that bring enterprise-grade infrastructure and operations to teams of every size.