pvtExtMgr (Private Extension Manager)

The purpose of this extension is to allow you to setup and maintain extensions for your vscode installation which are "automatically" kept up to date with a [private] git server. To this end, this module follows the same pattern as npm for specifying and tracking versions of npm modules*. This module allows the user to specify in this module's settings a dependencies-like list of #semver npm references to a git server and semver version specification for the desired version of the extension they would like to have installed. The primary goal is to support user developed and private extensions in vscode.

Note that the actual semver math is done by semver-extra, which, among other things, allows you to specify :prerelease as a semver specification which will match against prelrease versions of the package (to get the latest possible version--:prerelease is an alias for max() in semver-extra terminology). See semver-extra for more details.

Features

• Allows the user to trigger (manually for the moment), the checking for updates to extensions stored in git repos according the user settings for this extension.
• Can be made to keep a log of updates performed.

Requirements

This extension requires that the user already have git and npm installed and included in their path.

Extension Settings

pvtExtMgr.extensions : This is the most important setting for this extension. This setting lists which extensions you want pvtExtMgr to update for you and via which rule. This setting uses a subset of the npm dependency format--it will only accept #semver rules. Any other format will be ignored.

"pvtExtMgr.extensions": {
  "jsdoc-view": "git+ssh://git@127.0.0.1:/srv/git/jsdoc-view.git#semver:prerelease",
  "shinmark": "git+ssh://git@127.0.0.1:/srv/git/shinmark.git#semver:latest",
  "pvtExtMgr": "git+ssh://git@127.0.0.1:/srv/git/vscExt-pvtExtMgr.git#semver:~0.0.2"
}

This setting does extend the #semver format to add prerelease and latest as options. latest will follow the standard dependencies definition for versioning. prerelease will take the latest version, including prereleases. These maths are provided courtesy of the semver-extra module.

pvtExtMgr.clean : (defaults to true) If set to true, any module updated by this extension will also have a git clean -f run to remove any deleted files.

pvtExtMgr.keepLog : (defaults to false) If set to true, will cause this module to keep a log of its installation efforts in its extension directory. Log management is a thing, and this extension doesn't make any attempt to manage them. Intended primarily for troubleshooting.

Known Issues

Listed below are my known issues for this project. If you have a comment, suggestion, request or other input on this project, please ask a question or leave a comment on the vscode marketplace page for this project. If you encounter an issue, even one listed here, and would like to see it fixed, please go to the github issues tracker and file an issue. This project is very much in an "on demand" mode. If there is no demand, only issues which bother me sufficiently in contrast to my available time will actually get addressed.

• Sanitation of "private" ip addresses and the like has caused certain dev related facilities to fall down.
• I currently "update" extensions via fetch + checkout. (which will fetch all branches of the given repos).
• Does not verify that the user has permissions to update the extension(s) in question. To be clear, here I mean perms to modify the local file system. This falls under error handling & robustness
• This module does not debounce for multiple instances. By which I mean that it does not deal gracefully with the situation where a user has multiple instances of vscode open and executes an update from each of them at "the same time". (Which is why this extension is setup currently to be triggered manually).
  • On a related note, this extension makes no attempt to notify other vscode instances that extensions have been altered and need to be reloaded. VSCode itself appears hit or miss on noticing during informal testing, but this might well be related to whether a given extension was activated.
• This module has not been tested on the Mac or Linux (I don't have either setup atm). Pathing may be dorked on such platforms.
• I have done no testing for any of the myriad of git security/setups that might be in place. I use ssh with installed keys.
• Not tested with older versions of npm (only tested with npm 6).
• I could pretty print my dates more
• Could put in more detailed progress bar status updates

Futures

• This extension currently only runs when triggered manually. It could be extended to run when vscode starts up.
• It would be easy to add support for the "commitish" format as well.
• This extension now runs exclusively in async mode. For performance reasons, update requests could be "grouped" to take advantage of processor speed. Currently, updates are performed serially (in tandem).
• Settings to allow one to specify a specific git or npm client to use.
  • Support for custom credentials by extension
• Support to allow the user to trigger an update/check for a specific repos or with special conditions (no npm install, no git clean, etc.)

Release Notes

• 0.0.2 : Initial Release