Packaging the Extension

I am not, at the moment, interested in distributing an extension through the marketplace, so the final step is to package the extension up so that I can include it in my "regular" version of VSCode (and share it with anybody else who is interested).

Everything here is based on my reading of  the Microsoft documentation.

VSCE

All of the tasks around publishing seem to depend on a tool called vsce. This is obtained from Microsoft via npm as follows:

npm i -g vsce

By installing this globally, it can be run from anywhere.

Packaging the extension

From the package root (in my case vscode-java), simply run

vsce package

This produces a vsix file.

Installing the extension

From within VSCode, it is possible to select the Extensions tab on the sidebar (on the left hand side) and from the drop down menu it is possible to select Install from VSIX…. When you select this, a file chooser comes up and you can find the appropriate .vsix file and select it. This installs the extension in the current VSCode.

You can remove the extension by selecting the "settings" icon shown by the plugin (the gear icon) and choosing "Uninstall". It may be necessary to click on "Reload Required" to complete the uninstallation.

Handling the Java Executable

That, of course, would all be so easy if it weren't for the Java executable. This is going to "move" in the process of bundling the executable and so the code that locates it needs to be able to distinguish between the "development" and "release" cases.

This has two facets: first off, we need to copy it from its current build directory (in lsp-java) to the extension directory (vscode-java); then we need the extension.ts to look in both places and choose the development one if available, else the production version. All of this ends up being sufficiently complicated that I created a script, package.sh, to do all the packaging.

Conclusion

Packaging and installing an extension for VSCode was pleasantly easy. In fact, the whole process of dealing with extensions has been easier than I was expecting, and now I feel ready to tackle this in the real world.