Work with remote directories in VSCode using Remote SSH

The Remote - SSH extension makes opening and working with remote directories just as natural and fully-featured in Visual Studio Code as working with local directories. Once you set it up and have a remote directory open, you can browse the directory tree, open any files, find-replace and lookup definitions across all the files.

This is in contrast to the Remote VSCode extension which made it easy to open individual files residing on a remote computer using SSH, but was not ideal for larger-scale work like working on a project or directory of files.

Usage

To use this:

• Search for the Remote - SSH extension in VSCode and install it.
• Open Remote Explorer on the left and choose SSH Targets from the top dropdown. (If you are also using WSL, you might see WSL Targets listed there, but that is not what we want.)
• Click the + to add a new remote directory by providing the ssh joe@remote123 command and then the path on the remote computer. VSCode will prompt you for the password on the remote computer.
• You should now be able to do everything you could do locally in VSCode on this remote directory. Even code completion and code exploration across the files in the directory worked fine in Python and C++ code for me.
• If you open multiple remote directories, you can switch between them in the Remote Explorer or in the File -> Open Recent section.

Use without password

You will notice that VSCode asks for the remote password every time you open the remote directory or reopen VSCode. To avoid this, we need to understand how VSCode uses ssh and then provide the ssh client with an identity file as follows:

• The Remote - SSH extension uses the OpenSSH Windows client located at C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe for its SSH operations.
• It stores its remote computer (not remote directory) configuration in the %USERPROFILE%/.ssh/config file.

• By default, when you added a single remote computer, it would have these lines:

  Host 10.110.22.22
    HostName 10.110.22.22
    User joe

• To avoid entering password every time, we need to create a public-private key pair locally and share the key with the remote computer, as described here. I used the ssh inside WSL to create the public-private key pair.
• To make the VSCode's SSH client use these identity files, we copy over the id_rsa and id_rsa.pub generated by the above step to the %USERPROFILE%\.ssh directory. (Actually, the id_rsa.pub is not really needed, since we have already shared it to the remote computer in the earlier step.)
• By default, the VSCode SSH client looks for an identity file named id_rsa in the above directory, so now you should be able to open remote directory at will without entering the password.

• To make this explicit (in case you want to use a different path or filename), you can add an IdentityFile line to the SSH config file like this:

  Host 10.110.22.22
    HostName 10.110.22.22
    User joe
    IdentityFile ~\.ssh\id_rsa

  Note how the OpenSSH Windows client can understand the Unix ~ to map to %USERPROFILE, but needs Windows forward slashes (not the Unix back slashes) in the path.

Tried with: Visual Studio Code 1.47 and Windows 10