S3 Pulse for VS Code

S3 Pulse answers “Is my S3 data feed arriving when it should?” It monitors saved S3 prefixes, visualizes arrival cadence, reports backend-computed feed health, and downloads individual objects without handling AWS credentials in TypeScript.

Requirements

• Desktop VS Code or a desktop/remote extension host. Web-only VS Code cannot run the native backend.
• AWS credentials available through the normal AWS SDK credential chain (environment, profile, SSO, role, or instance/container credentials).
• Read access for the watched location: normally s3:ListBucket and s3:GetObject.

S3 Pulse does not create, upload, delete, or modify S3 resources.

Use

1. Open the S3 Pulse activity-bar view.
2. Choose Add Feed, then enter an s3://bucket/prefix/ URI and polling settings.
3. Start the feed and open its dashboard.
4. Select a row to download it or copy its S3 URI/key.

Feed definitions are persisted in VS Code global state. AWS credentials are never stored there.

Backend discovery

The extension launches one persistent s3pulse serve --stdio process in the extension host. It checks:

1. s3Pulse.backendPath, if configured; then
2. bin/<platform>-<architecture>/s3pulse[.exe] inside the installed extension.

The configured path supports ${extensionPath}, ${workspaceFolder}, and ${env:NAME} substitutions. Backend stdout is reserved for newline-delimited JSON-RPC; stderr appears in Output → S3 Pulse.

Build and test

cd extension
npm ci
npm run check
npm test
npm run compile

Unit tests cover the streaming JSON-line decoder and tolerant data normalization. esbuild produces dist/extension.js with no runtime npm dependencies.

Package platform VSIX files

Build the Rust backend in release mode and stage it for this platform with npm run stage-backend -- --release, which copies it to bin/<platform>-<architecture>/ and sets the executable bit. Then run:

npm run package -- --target darwin-arm64

Use the corresponding VS Code target (darwin-x64, linux-x64, linux-arm64, win32-x64, or win32-arm64) for each artifact. Do not put binaries for unrelated platforms into a platform VSIX.

For backend development, set s3Pulse.backendPath to a local release/debug executable instead of copying it into bin/.