Building Bitcoin Core on Linux/Ubuntu with Visual Studio Code

Question

Does anyone developing Bitcoin Core use VSCode for compilation and debugging on Linux/Ubuntu?

How can one configure VSCode to compile Bitcoin Core?

Answer 1

I found a solution to work with VSCode, and use it for compilation.

1. Install vscode on your machine, including the C/C++ development extension
2. Create a directory named .vscode in the root of bitcoin repository folder
3. Create a .vscode/c_cpp_properties.json file. This file contains the configuration for the C/C++ project, including compiler type and source path.
4. Create a .vscode/tasks.json file. This file contains configuration for build and test tasks, which compiles the code and parses errors into the IDE
5. Hit Ctrl+Shift+B to run the build task

If you want to develop on a Windows machine but build and run on a remote Linux machine, this can be done with the Remote Development extension. After connecting to the remote server, create the relevant files in the directory.

The relevant json files:

c_cpp_properties.json

{
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Linux",
            "includePath": [
                "${default}",
                "${workspaceFolder}/src"
            ],
            "compilerPath": "/usr/bin/gcc",
            "cStandard": "gnu17",
            "cppStandard": "gnu++17",
            "intelliSenseMode": "linux-gcc-x64",
            "browse": {
                "path": [
                    "${workspaceFolder}/src"
                ],
                "limitSymbolsToIncludedHeaders": false,
                "databaseFilename": "${workspaceFolder}/.vscode/browse.vc.db"
            }
        }
    ],
    "version": 4
}

tasks.json

{
    // See https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=733558
    // for the documentation about the tasks.json format
    "version": "2.0.0",
    "tasks": [
        {
            "label": "Build",
            "type": "shell",
            "command": "make -j 8",
            "problemMatcher": {
                "base": "$gcc",
                "fileLocation": ["relative", "${workspaceFolder}/src"]
            },
            "options": {
                "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}"
            },
            "group": {
                "kind": "build",
                "isDefault": true
            }
        },
        {
            "label": "Test",
            "type": "shell",
            "command": "make check",
            "problemMatcher": {
                "base": "$gcc",
                "fileLocation": ["relative", "${workspaceFolder}/src"]
            },
            "options": {
                "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}"
            },
            "group": {
                "kind": "test",
                "isDefault": true
            }
        },
        {
            "label": "Clean",
            "type": "shell",
            "command": "make clean",
            "problemMatcher": {
                "base": "$gcc",
                "fileLocation": ["relative", "${workspaceFolder}/src"]
            },
            "options": {
                "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}"
            },
        },
    ]
}