Publishing your VSCode 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.

{{< blockquote type="important" text="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.

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

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name: Release
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on:
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  release:
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    types:
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      - published
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  workflow_dispatch:
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jobs:
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  release:
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    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
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    steps:
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      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
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      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
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        with:
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          node-version: 14
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          registry-url: https://registry.npmjs.org/
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      - name: Install the dependencies
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        run: npm i
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      - name: Install vsce
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        run: npm i -g vsce
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      - name: Publish
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        run: vsce publish -p ${{ secrets.VSCE_PAT }}