Automate VS Code extensions setup across profiles

Motivation

I now work with Visual Studio Code for several years in many different workloads:

• Azure scripting in Azure CLI and PowerShell
• .NET development
• Python development
• Go development
• Bash scripting
• ...

With that I collected a number of extensions in Visual Studio Code - before writing this article : 53 - which makes startup of VS Code slow, especially when I already have a lot of going on on my machine and much more so with the machine behind the corporate let-inspect-just-everything proxy.

When learning about VS Code profiles I thought that I could create an utility that helps me setup extensions tailored to my various editing workloads.

Prerequisites

I did not yet figure out how to manage profiles programmatically, hence before running the script the profiles touched by the script need to be created first:

Automation Script

This bare bone script (no checkings, no safety nets) is capable of removing installed extensions on all profiles specified and then install extensions for those profiles:

param(
    [string] $ProfilePattern = ".*",
    [switch] $Clear,
    [switch] $Install
)

$config = @{
    "Default" = @("humao.rest-client")
    "pwsh"    = @("ms-vscode.powershell")
    "py"      = @("ms-python.python")
    "az"      = @("humao.rest-client", "ms-vscode.azure-account", "ms-vscode.azurecli")
    "dotnet"  = @("humao.rest-client", "ms-dotnettools.csharp")
}

if ($Clear) {
    foreach ($p in ($config.Keys | ? { $_ -match $ProfilePattern })) {
        Write-Host "clear profile" $p
        code --profile $p --list-extensions | % { code --profile $p --uninstall-extension $_ --force }
    }
}

if ($Install) {
    foreach ($p in ($config.Keys | ? { $_ -match $ProfilePattern })) {
        Write-Host "install profile" $p "extensions"
        foreach ($e in $config[$p]) {
            code --profile $p --install-extension $e --force
        }
    }
}

Usage

Note on Settings Sync

As I have settings sync activated on all my VS Code instances, above setup was synchronized from my Windows box configuration, where I originally ran the script, to my other Windows and Linux boxes and VMs.