I’ve been using VS Code for my Golang development needs for a few months now. Minor kinks here and there, nothing serious, and the development experience gets better with every update. I have also tried out IntelliJ Idea as the editor, and one feature that I’m missing in Code from Idea is the build-run-reload process. I thought to myself, that’s such a basic feature, it should be possible to have that.
And it is! VS Code Tasks to the rescue!
Visual Studio Golang Tutorial
These tasks allow us to run different kind of tools and, well, tasks inside VS Code.
Go to Tasks -> Configure Default Build Task and then select the “Create tasks.json file from template” in the little pop-up window, and after that select the “Others” option. This tasks.json file will live inside the .vscode directory.
Golang Extension For Visual Studio
For my overcomplicated d20 roller, which is my first website built with Golang, I have the following content for the tasks:
Getting started with Go on Visual Studio Code. Education Details: Jun 25, 2018 The Go extension for Visual Studio Code makes use of a number of Go command line tools. They are not installed with the extension, but there is an installation process that provides a convenient way of adding them to the configuration. According to a recent Google survey, 41% of Go developers are using Visual Studio Code as their editor.Microsoft believes moving VS Code to Golang will help developers. “Today we are happy to.
What this one task does is that it runs go build to build the project and then runs the generated executable, which for this project is d20.
I guess providing a standardized name to go build with the -o flag this could be made more portable so that the command part reads something like go build -o proj && ./proj, but I’m ok with this for now.
And now just type Ctrl+Shift+b and Code will execute this “Build and run” task for us! Hooray! The terminal window in Code will pop-up saying something like:
By going to http://localhost:8080 I can see that my little website is up and running. Cool.
But if we want to restart this taks, running Ctrl+Shift+b again won’t work and Code will complain that the “Task is already active blablabla…'.
Looking at the Tasks menu, we can see that there’s a “Restart running task…” menu entry. Clicking that, it pops up a window with a list of running tasks. In this case there’s only one, our “Build and run” task. Clicking through the menu every time would be boring, so let’s add a keyboard shortcut for it.
Go to File -> Preferences -> Keyboard shortcuts (or just hit Ctrl+k Ctrl+s), search for “Restart running task” keybinding, and set it to whatever you like. I’ve set it to Ctrl+Alt+r.
Finally, the flow is Ctrl+Shift+b to start the taks for the very first time, code-code-code, Ctrl+Alt+r to re-build. Sweet. Now the only annoying bit is that I have to pick out that one running task from the list of running tasks when restarting, but I can live with that. For now.
Happy hackin’!