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