2024/1/25 11:24 Installing VSCode Server on Remote Machine in Private Network (Offline Installation) | by Rahul Kumar | Medium

Installing VSCode Server on Remote Machine

in Private Network (Offline Installation)
Rahul Kumar · Follow
3 min read · Sep 5, 2020

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The Visual Studio Code Remote — SSH extension allows you to open a remote folder on
any remote machine, virtual machine, or container with a running SSH server and take
full advantage of VS Code’s feature set. Once connected to a server, you can interact with
files and folders anywhere on the remote filesystem.

No source code needs to be on your local machine to gain these benefits since the extension
runs commands and other extensions directly on the remote machine.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

This article explains the steps to be followed to install VSCdoe and VSCode server in
a private network when we don’t have an internet connection in the local and
remote machine. We can do an offline installation in this scenario.

Terminology:

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2024/1/25 11:24 Installing VSCode Server on Remote Machine in Private Network (Offline Installation) | by Rahul Kumar | Medium

1. Local Machine (Local OS) → The system on which we will be running VSCode.
(No Internet Connection)

2. Remote Machine (Remote OS) → The system on which we will be running

Open in app Sign up Sign in
VSCode Server. (No Internet Connection)

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3. External Machine → The external system which we will use to download the
offline installers. This is the only machine we have an internet connection.

Steps for offline installation:

Step 1: Download the VSCode offline installer for your external machine from
https://code.visualstudio.com/#alt-downloads

Step 2: Transfer the offline installer file on your local machine and install it.

Step 3: Follow ssh host setup from the following link

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh#_ssh-host-setup

If we don’t have an internet network on Remote Machine, then local machine will try to
download the VSCode server locally and then copy it to the remote machine and install it.
But if we don’t have an internet connection in the local OS then it will fail.

VSCode Error Message

Continue with the following steps to do the offline installation of VSCode Remote
Server

Step 4: Click on the Output tab to check for the logs. We can see it was not able to
download vscode server on the remote machine but it failed. Then as a fallback
option, it tried to download the vscode server on local machine which will then be
transferred to the remote machine. But that also failed because we don’t have an

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2024/1/25 11:24 Installing VSCode Server on Remote Machine in Private Network (Offline Installation) | by Rahul Kumar | Medium

internet connection on the local as well, Get the commit ID and destFolder from
logs.

OR

Connect to the remote machine and list the directories in the following directory to
get the commit ID

$ ls ~/.vscode-server/bin
c9a2f78283b6e5ef708fb8869e2a5adaa476e42f

Step 5: Download the offline installation version of vscode server externally using
the following link

For Stable Version

https://update.code.visualstudio.com/commit:{COMMIT_ID}/server-linux-x64/stable

For Insider Version

https://update.code.visualstudio.com/commit:{COMMIT_ID}/server-linux-
x64/insider

For example,

https://update.code.visualstudio.com/commit:c9a2f78283b6e5ef708fb8869e2a5adaa4
76e42/server-linux-x64/insider

Step 6: Transfer this file to the remote machine.

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2024/1/25 11:24 Installing VSCode Server on Remote Machine in Private Network (Offline Installation) | by Rahul Kumar | Medium

Step 7: Extract the content of this file in the destFolder mentioned in the VSCode
logs.

Usually, it is

~/.vscode-server/bin/{COMMIT_ID}

To extract run the following commands

$ cd ~/.vscode-server/bin/c9a2f78283b6e5ef708fb8869e2a5adaa476e42f

$ tar -xvzf ~/vscode-server-linux-x64.tar.gz --strip-components 1

vscode-server-linux-x64/LICENSE
vscode-server-linux-x64/node
vscode-server-linux-x64/bin/
vscode-server-linux-x64/bin/code-insiders
vscode-server-linux-x64/server.sh
vscode-server-linux-x64/package.json
vscode-server-linux-x64/out/
vscode-server-linux-x64/out/nls.metadata.json
...
...
...

Now we are done with VSCode installation on the local machine and VSCode Server
on the remote machine. Go ahead and try to connect with remote machine as
mentioned here https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh#_connect-to-a-
remote-host

Vscode Ssh Remote Working Programming

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Senior Software Engineer @ QuantumBlack, a McKinsey company

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