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Installing Vscode Server Offline

Tags: vscode

These are my basic notes on installing the server piece that is required to run Remote-SSH Extension in VSCode on a remote server that is air gapped or otherwise lacks internet connectivity.

I think obtaining the required vscode-server file is janky, I do not see a github for it and the “fix” I found downloads it via a direct link.

  1. Install VSCode
  2. Connect to a server with internet connectivity and then find the md5 sum generated as a directory name in ~/.vscode-server/bin/
  3. Download https://update.code.visualstudio.com/commit:{hash}/server-linux-x64/stable
  4. Unpack the tar file into ~/.vscode-server/bin/{hash}

Update 2025-04-24

You can obtain the hash by checking the following URL, replace with your VSCode version

Terminal window
Invoke-WebRequest  https://api.github.com/repos/microsoft/vscode/git/refs/tags/1.98.1 | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Content | ConvertFrom-Json | Select-Object -ExpandProperty object | Select sha

All release info

Deploying on the server side

The following script can be executed on a Linux host to extract the server into the proper directory (or tell you that it is already written). This would need to be run by each user, I see no simple way to automate it further than this script.

Terminal window
SERVER_TAR=\path\to\vscode-server-linux-x64.tar.gz
COMMIT=c3511e6c69bb39013c4a4b7b9566ec1ca73fc4d5


DEST=~/.vscode-server/bin/$COMMIT


if [ ! -d $DEST ] ; then
    mkdir -p $DEST
    tar -xzvf $SERVER_TAR -C $DEST --strip-components=1
else
    echo "Already in place"
fi

Linux script to pull

Terminal window
i=0
TAG=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/microsoft/vscode/releases | jq -r .[$i].tag_name)


while [ $TAG != "null" ]
do
        HASH=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/microsoft/vscode/git/refs/tags/$TAG | jq -r .object.sha)
        OUTPUT_PATH="./outputs/commit:$HASH/server-linux-x64/"
        mkdir -p $OUTPUT_PATH
        curl -JLO https://update.code.visualstudio.com/commit:$HASH/server-linux-x64/stable  --output-dir $OUTPUT_PATH
        ((i = i + 1))
        TAG=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/microsoft/vscode/releases | jq -r .[$i].tag_name)
done