ℹ️ This extension is still in development. Please share your feedback/thoughts by submitting or commenting on issues, pull requests or discussions.

systemd extension for Visual Studio Code

The systemd extension makes it easy to inspect, manage, and create systemd units from Visual Studio Code.

Prerequisites

This extension uses the systemctl(1) and systemd-analyze(1) commands to interact with and analyze systemd units. The pkexec(1) command is used to elevate priveledges when interacting with system units.

If your environment does not contain these commands the extension will not work properly.

Overview of the extension features

Editing systemd unit files

This extension provides basic IntelliSense when editing your systemd unit files including syntax highlighting, document outlines, folding ranges, property descriptions on hover, and unit symbol definitions.

ℹ️ This feature is a currently in it's early stages and not feature complete yet. It will be extened in future releases.

Units Explorer

This extension contributes a Units Explorer view to VS Code. The Units Explorer lets you examine and manage units.

The right-click menu provides access to commonly used commands for each type of asset.

The Units Explorer supports comprehensive configuration: group and sort units, apply a filter, and customize the label, description, and icon displayed for each unit.

Unit commands

Commands to interfact with units are built right into the Command Palette:

Snippets

Snippets can be used to speed up writing/editing unit files:

Install unit files

Install unit files from the active editor or the file explorer:

Inspect system startup times

Plot which system services have been started at what time, highlighting the time they spent on initialization:

Credit

This extension is inspired by and contains some of the code of:

• vscode-containers extension (License: MIT)
• systemd-unit-file extension (License: MIT)

License

vscode-systemd
Copyright (C) 2026 Dominik Viererbe <hello@dviererbe.de>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.