Code Extension Marketplace

The Code Extension Marketplace is an open-source alternative to the VS Code Marketplace for use in editors like code-server or VSCodium.

It is maintained by Coder and is used by our enterprise customers in regulated and security-conscious industries like banking, asset management, military, and intelligence where they deploy Coder in an air-gapped network and accessing an internet-hosted marketplace is not allowed.

This marketplace reads extensions from file storage and provides an API for editors to consume. It does not have a frontend or any mechanisms for extension authors to add or update extensions in the marketplace.

Deployment

The marketplace is a single binary. Deployment involves running the binary, pointing it to a directory of extensions, and exposing the binary's bound address in some way.

Kubernetes

If deploying with Kubernetes see the Helm directory otherwise read on.

Getting the binary

The binary can be downloaded from GitHub releases. For example here is a way to download the latest release using wget. Replace $os and $arch with your operating system and architecture.

wget https://github.com/coder/code-marketplace/releases/latest/download/code-marketplace-$os-$arch -O ./code-marketplace
chmod +x ./code-marketplace

Running the server

The marketplace server can be ran using the server sub-command.

./code-marketplace server [flags]

Run ./code-marketplace --help for a full list of options.

Local storage

To use a local directory for extension storage use the --extensions-dir flag.

./code-marketplace [command] --extensions-dir ./extensions

Artifactory storage

It is possible use Artifactory as a file store instead of local storage. For this to work the ARTIFACTORY_TOKEN environment variable must be set.

export ARTIFACTORY_TOKEN="my-token"
./code-marketplace [command] --artifactory http://artifactory.server/artifactory --repo extensions

The token will be used in the Authorization header with the value Bearer <TOKEN>.

Exposing the marketplace

The marketplace must be put behind TLS otherwise code-server will reject connecting to the API. This could mean using a TLS-terminating reverse proxy like NGINX or Caddy with your own domain and certificates or using a service like Cloudflare.

When hosting the marketplace behind a reverse proxy set either the Forwarded header or both the X-Forwarded-Host and X-Forwarded-Proto headers. These headers are used to generate absolute URLs to extension assets in API responses. One way to test this is to make a query and check one of the URLs in the response:

curl 'https://example.com/api/extensionquery' -H 'Accept: application/json;api-version=3.0-preview.1' --compressed -H 'Content-Type: application/json' --data-raw '{"filters":[{"criteria":[{"filterType":8,"value":"Microsoft.VisualStudio.Code"}],"pageSize":1}],"flags":439}' | jq .results[0].extensions[0].versions[0].assetUri
"https://example.com/assets/vscodevim/vim/1.24.1"

The marketplace does not support being hosted behind a base path; it must be proxied at the root of your domain.

Health checks

The /healthz endpoint can be used to determine if the marketplace is ready to receive requests.

Adding extensions

Extensions can be added to the marketplace by file, directory, or web URL.

./code-marketplace add extension.vsix [flags]
./code-marketplace add extension-vsixs/ [flags]
./code-marketplace add https://domain.tld/extension.vsix [flags]

If the extension has dependencies or is in an extension pack those details will be printed. Extensions listed as dependencies must also be added but extensions in a pack are optional.

If an extension is open source you can get it from one of three locations:

1. GitHub releases (if the extension publishes releases to GitHub).
2. Open VSX (if the extension is published to Open VSX).
3. Building from source.

For example to add the Python extension from Open VSX:

./code-marketplace add https://open-vsx.org/api/ms-python/python/2022.14.0/file/ms-python.python-2022.14.0.vsix [flags]

Or the Vim extension from GitHub:

./code-marketplace add https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/releases/download/v1.24.1/vim-1.24.1.vsix [flags]

Removing extensions

Extensions can be removed from the marketplace by ID and version or --all to remove all versions.

./code-marketplace remove [email protected] [flags]
./code-marketplace remove ms-python.python --all [flags]

Usage in code-server

You can point code-server to your marketplace by setting the EXTENSIONS_GALLERY environment variable.

The value of this variable is a JSON blob that specifies the service URL, item URL, and resource URL template.

• serviceURL: specifies the location of the API (https://<domain>/api).
• itemURL: the frontend for extensions which is currently just a mostly blank page that says "not supported" (https://<domain>/item)
• resourceURLTemplate: used to download web extensions like Vim; code-server itself will replace the {publisher}, {name}, {version}, and {path} template variables so use them verbatim (https://<domain>/files/{publisher}/{name}/{version}/{path}).

For example (replace <domain> with your marketplace's domain):

export EXTENSIONS_GALLERY='{"serviceUrl":"https://<domain>/api", "itemUrl":"https://<domain>/item", "resourceUrlTemplate": "https://<domain>/files/{publisher}/{name}/{version}/{path}"}'
code-server

If code-server reports content security policy errors ensure that the marketplace is running behind an https URL.

Usage in VS Code & VSCodium

Although not officially supported, you can follow the examples below to start using code-marketplace with VS Code and VSCodium:

• VS Code
• VSCodium

Missing features

• Recommended extensions.
• Featured extensions.
• Download counts.
• Ratings.
• Searching by popularity.
• Published, released, and updated dates for extensions (for example this will cause bogus release dates to show for versions).
• Frontend for browsing available extensions.
• Extension validation (only the marketplace owner can add extensions anyway).
• Adding and updating extensions by extension authors.

Planned work

• Bulk add from one Artifactory repository to another (or to itself).
• Optional database to speed up queries.
• Progress indicators when adding/removing extensions.