I automated publishing my VSCode Extension

Grand Palais by @photosbysaurav on Instagram

Github Actions has changed the way CI/CD is done for Open-Source projects. In this blog post, I want to show you one awesome way this has come in handy, in one of my projects.

Premise

I manage 'Custom Profiles for VSCode', which is an extension to help you create isolated VSCode Instances and also for teams to align on their VSCode configuration.

The Problem

Every time I make an improvement to the project, I have to do this additional task of creating a .vsix bundle and upload it to the VSCode Marketplace. What I'd love to do is, merge my code changes and automate all the deployment related tasks.

Github Actions to the Rescue

I chose to tackle this with Github Actions. I create a PR - which should ideally try to build and test my package and once merged, automatically deploy to the VSCode Marketplace.

Let's Dive into the Code

All the code is available on github in the 'Custom Profiles for VSCode' repository. You can find the workflow file here - cd.yml

Here's the simple workflow file I used to automate the deployment.

name: "cd"

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - cool

jobs:
  cd:
    runs-on…