Visual Studio Code is a code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. It might be a good idea to install "Remote Development" extension pack which allows you to open any folder in a container, on a remote machine, or in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and take advantage of VS Code's full feature set. It includes 'Remote SSH', 'Remote Containers' and 'Remote WSL' extensions.

VS Code ( vscode ) should ONLY be run from computational nodes. Do not run VS Code on Biowulf or Helix. Please follow instructions on this page to run on compute node. Please contact staff@hpc.nih.gov if you run into issues while following the below steps.

Note

• Error: Connecting with SSH timed out; If this error appear frequently, please go to the setting of Remote-SSH extension of VS Code and modify the 'Remote.SSH: Connect Timeout' to 30 seconds.

Documentation

• VS Code main site

This application can be utilized interactively via the HPC OnDemand web interface.

We recommend using HPC OnDemand to access Visual Studio Code. This uses Open OnDemand to provide a convenient interface to launch and access VS Code sessions in interactive jobs without requiring complex SSH tunneling and configuration.

This method provides the same interface as a native installation of VS Code inside a browser window. Rather than using the Remote SSH extension to connect to a remote host, VS Code is running natively on a compute node in a Slurm job with the interface presented to you via web browser using secure Open OnDemand proxies. The first time you connect to VSCode, you will need to configure any VSCode extensions you wish to use. On subsequent VSCode sessions, your extensions will automatically load from your home directory on Biowulf.

To access VS Code via Open OnDemand, you navigate to the VS Code application page, configure the resources your job requires, and launch your job.

For more information about Biowulf's Open OnDemand installation, access, and other services available please see our documentation.

We encourage you to try using VS Code via Open OnDemand as it provides a much simpler and more stable connection to VS Code running on the Biowulf cluster and should support nearly all use cases that the remote SSH method supports.

1. Generate an ssh keypair with this command in windows powershell:
   ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096. The key should be passphrase protected.
   

2. Copy the public key from your local computer to the authorized_keys file on Helix (replace xxx with your own user name):
   scp C:\Users\xxx\.ssh\id_rsa.pub xxx@helix.nih.gov:~/tmp.pub
   

3. Log in to Helix:

       helix $ mkdir -p ~/.ssh 
       helix $ chmod 0700 ~/.ssh
       helix $ cat tmp.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
       helix $ rm tmp.pub
       helix $ chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

4. In an administrative powershell session(your institute IT department may need to be involved):
   Is ssh-agent enabled?: Get-Service ssh-agent | Select StartType
   If the StartType is Disabled, enable with: Get-Service -Name ssh-agent | Set-Service -StartupType Manual
   

   

5. In an non-administrative powershell session:
   Run ssh-agent.exe
   Add your keys using ssh-add
   

6. In the 'search' box at the bottom left corner of windows desktop, type notepad C:\Users\xxx\.ssh\config and press enter. Replace xxx with your own user name.
   

7. Add the following to this file (replace xxx with your own user name):
   

   Host cn*
   User xxx
   ProxyCommand C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe -o ForwardAgent=yes xxx@biowulf.nih.gov nc -w 120ms %h %p
   

   

8. Save and close the file.

9. Install the "Remote Development" VScode extension. In VS Code Remote-SSH extension add the following in the settings section to your "Remote.SSH: Config File" (replace XXX with your own user name): C:\Users\XXX\.ssh\config
   

   

10. Start an sinteractive session on Biowulf (using an alternate method such as putty or nomachine) and take note of the compute node number (cnXXXX).
    

11. In VS Code, click the bottom left icon, select/type 'Remote-SSH: Connect to host'
    

12. In the box, replace "XXXX" with the actual compute node number obtained in step 10, then click on the node name (not press enter). Select 'linux', 'continue', then the node number should appear at the bottom left.
    

    

    

    

13. You should now be able to open a terminal in VS Code to cnXXXX and edit/run scripts directly on cnXXXX.

We encourage you to try using VS Code via Open OnDemand as it provides a much simpler and more stable connection to VS Code running on the Biowulf cluster and should support nearly all use cases that the remote SSH method supports.

The instructions for Mac OSX is very similar to the Windows instructions

1. Install the "Remote Development" VScode extension on your Mac.

2. Generate an ssh keypair and copy (passphrase protected) public key to Biowulf. See Mac section on https://hpc.nih.gov/docs/sshkeys.html

3. In your Mac terminal:
   a) run "ssh-agent" to start the agent.
   b) Add your keys using "ssh-add".
   c) Add the following to .ssh\config in local computer (replace $username with your own username):
   

   Host cn*
   User $username
   ProxyCommand /usr/bin/ssh -o ForwardAgent=yes $username@biowulf.nih.gov nc -w 120ms %h %p

4. In VSCode Remote SSH add the following in the settings section to your "Remote.SSH: Config File"(replace $username with your user name): /Users/$username/.ssh/config

5. Start an sinteractive session on Biowulf (using an alternate method such as putty or nomachine) and take note of the compute node number (cnXXXX).

6. Use VSCode "Remote-SSH Connect to Host" to connect to cnXXXX (replace "XXXX" with the actual compute node number obtained in step 5.

7. You should now be able to open a terminal in VS Code to cnXXXX and edit/run scripts directly on cnXXXX.

1. Install Jupyter extension in VS Code

2. Setup remote-ssh connection following above Windows step 1-13 or Mac step 1-7.

3. Once connected to compute node (see node number at bottom left corner) following step 1, open jupyter nb file from 'File' menu and type the full path of the file such as /data/YourUserName/xxx.ipynb. Python environment can be selected by clicking 'select kernel' at top right corner and 'python environments'.
   • 

You are now running Jupyter Notebook on a compute node.

Please see the Biowulf Jupyter page for more information about running Jupyter outside VS Code on Biowulf.