Roves Run

Run a web project you've already built (dist/, or whatever you call it) locally with the Roves shell, straight from VS Code — no Rust or Python toolchain, and nothing added to your project. The extension downloads the right prebuilt shell for your OS once, caches it outside your workspace, and points it at your dist/ folder directly.

How it works

Click Roves: Run in the status bar (or run the command from the Command Palette). The first time, this downloads roves_shell_<platform>[_steam].zip from Roves' GitHub releases for your platform, showing progress in the status bar, and caches it under VS Code's own extension storage — never inside your workspace. Every following run reuses that cached shell instantly.

It then writes a small launch.json next to the cached shell binary pointing at your project's dist/index.html by absolute path, and launches it — the same mechanism a real mach bundle output uses to find its own bundled content, just pointed at your project directly instead. See src/shell.ts for exactly how.

Extension Settings

Commands

• Roves: Run — download the configured shell if needed, then launch your dist/ folder.
• Roves: Stop — stop the currently running instance.

Output (stdout/stderr from the shell itself) goes to the Roves output channel.

Requirements

None — just a built project with an index.html somewhere. Steam builds still need Steam running locally if you want steam_appid.txt to actually resolve to anything.

Known limitations

• Downloaded shells are cached per version/platform/Steam-variant under VS Code's global storage and never cleaned up automatically — delete them yourself (from the extension's storage folder) if you want to reclaim disk space from old versions.
• roves-run.distFolder must contain a loose (uncompressed) build — this extension doesn't pack content the way mach bundle --content-compress=auto does; it isn't needed for a local dev loop.