#DevHack: Publishing your Code Extensions from GitHub Actions

Automation is key! That is how I think anyway. I'm not too fond of repetition, but for some reason, I had not yet automated my Visual Studio Code extension publishing. I always did this manually from my terminal by running vsce publish.

With my latest extension, I thought, now is the time to automate this as well.

Setting up your workflow

When publishing your Code extensions, you need to use the Visual Studio Code Extension command-line tool: vsce. Typically this is something you install locally by running npm i -g vsce.

In this case, we will do this on GitHub Actions instead, but before you can start, you need to create your Personal Access Token or also called PAT.

Important: Get your personal access token to publish to the VS Code Marketplace

When you got this PAT, add it as a GitHub Secret to your project.

We will use this secret in the GitHub Actions workflow which looks as follows:

name: Release
on:
  release:
    types:
      - published
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 14
          registry-url: https://registry.npmjs.org/

      - name: Install the dependencies
        run: npm i

      - name: Install vsce
        run: npm i -g vsce

      - name: Publish
        run: vsce publish -p ${{ secrets.VSCE_PAT }}

Info: The GitHub Actions workflow gets triggered whenever you create and publish a new release. In the last step, the PAT will be used to publish your extension.

Important: Make sure to set the publisher to your account in the package.json file. For me, this is eliostruyf.

Article first published on eliostruyf.com