Hello there. Today (about an hour ago) I tried something cool. As the title says it. I will show you how to install visual studio code (code Oss) on android. Yes, you got it right.
I will assume you know how to use a terminal. In this tutorial, we will use the most popular android terminal called termux. You can get it here.
Code Oss
I will not waste your time. It's a fork of visual studio code intended for arm based computers like Chromebooks. You can check on their official site
How to install
Here i assume you've installed termux
Steps :
Install Ubuntu in your Android device. It's targeted for such systems. Copy paste the following and wait for it to finish installing
pkg install wget openssl-tool proot -y && hash -r && wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EXALAB/AnLinux-Resources/master/Scripts/Installer/Ubuntu/ubuntu.sh && bash ubuntu.sh
Once done, run this command:
./start-ubuntu.sh
When you are in the Ubuntu terminal, you can run the following to grab the editor.
wget https://github.com/cdr/code-server/releases/download/2.1698/code-server2.1698-vsc1.41.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz
Extract it with the following.
tar -xvf ./code-server2.1698-vsc1.41.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz
Voila, you have the editor extracted . Now you can optionally delete the archive to free up some space else your are going to use it later.
The files are no more in an executable format, they need to be placed in a /bin folder for you to have the ability to call it
Due to that, the following command should do the work :
cp ./code-server2.1698-vsc1.41.1-linux-arm64/code-server /bin
Voilà. You can now call the editor by running "code-server" any where in your terminal and you will be able to use it. It is served on localhost:8080.
Final note: Each time you launch it, you'll see a new password and it can be annoying. So let's set a password in our environment variables.
Run this :
export PASSWORD="<your_password>"
Replace with any password of your choice and each time you launch the editor. You'll use the exact same password.
Here is my original tweet :
Liquid error: internal
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Most credits : Ada Rose article : Coding on Samsung DeX
Top comments (25)
Now for bonus points, how do I install node to that ubuntu instance, and map/mount the sd card :D
Any idea how to install code server directly on termux home or make a link for my files to Ubuntu? All of my project folders, packages, modules are in termux home directory which can't seem to be accessed using code server.
Personally I have never tried. You could do so :). I don't use the vscode that much tho
Which code editor are you then using?
Vim/Emacs
Just to let you know, there is also an vs code clone on playstore named VHS code. If you want you could also make a article on that so others can benefit from it.
Is there?
Here's the link. It has bugs though. play.google.com/store/apps/details.... If you want you code check out these two apps. Acode and spck code editor.
VHS code seems to work fine. It's basically just a wrapper for termux running code-server. Which is great actually. There will be lots of input bugs on phones because Monaco doesn't really support touch screens and phone keyboards for some reason. But physical keyboards or Samsung Dex should work well
Install codeboard or hacker's keyboard. You should not have any typing issues after that.
Well, I might have tiny-screen issues on my phone. I'm just excited to have the option to dev for real on Android. It will go well with windowing, laptops, tablets etc
yeap. Dev for real? Well, I use it an alternative till I get a new pc. It still lacks a lot of things.
Well primarily I use Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and even chrome os, but this is a nice step towards making Android a viable platform to develop on
True
I ended up installing code-server in a cloud provider I had and installed the site as a pwa on the phone. Having the full linux bash in the terminal is nice and it requires less work compiling weird projects. The next step would be to create a vpn so the phone could share a connection to another network (or if it was run on a laptop) to access things on a local network (I'm an IoT dev)
Those crazy things we can acheive nowadays ! 😅
Yeah it's cool
I'd love to see an update to this article using the newest version of code-server.
This is beautiful! Now my Galaxy Tap is a full-fledged dev machine. I'd never imagined I could do genuine C++ development on Android.
That's exciting. I can now write C/C++ and even Rust on my phone 🤪
This was helpful but how can i run cpp on it?
Hi, as visual studio code is running inside termux, you can technically run any command from vscode terminal and it will get executed in termux. Just make sure you have
clangorgccinstalled.Uou... Thanks for this! o/
My python extensions are not installing ... it's shows an error telling that ...this extension is not compatible for this version..how do I install the latest version of it
I think that could be expected as the extension builds are designed to run on some specific platforms. It is possible to modify the extension to run on
aarchthough