VS Code Flatpak Support

[mmstick]

Problem

Linux distributions are collectively moving towards Flatpak as a distribution model for third party applications. However, the VS Code extension is currently unsupported within the VS Code Flatpak, due to the way that it tries to spawn ra_lsp_server by looking up its path within system paths — paths that won't exist inside of a Flatpak container.

Solution

The extension could check for the existence of /usr/bin/flatpak-spawn to determine if being run within a Flatpak container. If within a Flatpak container, ra_lsp_server can be invoked with flatpak-spawn --host ra_lsp_server.

[bjorn3]

I solved this by telling flatpak to let the PATH env var to include ~/.cargo/bin, but your solution is much better I think.

[matklad]

Hm, looks like this ideally should be some build-in API in the VS Code, similar to how file system is. But I guess there isn't, and we indeed should do this ourselves :-(

Also, I cannot help but note that there's a much better solution for reproducible application packaging :-)

[mmstick]

I solved this by telling flatpak to let the PATH env var to include ~/.cargo/bin, but your solution is much better I think.

For anyone wondering how to get this to work:

flatpak --user override com.visualstudio.code \
    --env=PATH=/app/bin:/usr/bin:/home/$USER/.cargo/bin

[bjorn3]

The extension now downloads it's own rust-analyzer executable into the extension storage. I am using VSCode inside Flatpak and haven't had any trouble in a long time.

[dhardy]

Essentially the same issue occurs with VSCodium in a flatpak:

error: could not execute process `rustc -vV` (never executed) Caused by: No such file or directory (os error 2)

Solution is as above:

flatpak --user override com.vscodium.codium  --env=PATH=/app/bin:/usr/bin:/home/$USER/.cargo/bin

[willswats]

Could this be reopened? I had to use the flatpak override provided by dhardy to get the extension working on the VSCodium flatpak.

[bjorn3]

@willswats What do you want rust-analyzer to do? Using flatpak override from within a flatpak application is not possible and rust-analyzer doesn't know what to add to PATH as you may have installed rustc and cargo anywhere. Rust-analyzer gets the location from PATH.

[willswats]

@bjorn3 I don't know enough about rust-analyzer or flatpak to come up with a solution, but I wouldn't regard this as solved if the user has to search online for a fix.

[mmstick]

You should report the issue to the maintainer of the flathub package.

[RichardJECooke]

@mmstick I ran flatpak --user override com.visualstudio.code --env=PATH=/app/bin:/usr/bin:/home/$USER/.cargo/bin and nothing happened. I then opened VSCode from the taskbar and rust-analyzer still had the error.

[ERROR rust_analyzer::main_loop] FetchWorkspaceError:
rust-analyzer failed to load workspace: Failed to load the project at /home/ne/code/rust-actix-web/complete-application/Cargo.toml: Failed to query rust toolchain version at /home/me/code/rust-actix-web/complete-application, is your toolchain setup correctly?: cd "/home/me/code/rust-actix-web/complete-application" && "cargo" "--version" failed: No such file or directory (os error 2)

[RichardJECooke]

Yeah I think VSCode under flatpak is just broken. They should remove it rather messing people around.

Rather install it from the site proper -

curl -L -o vscode.deb "https://code.visualstudio.com/sha/download?build=stable&os=linux-deb-x64" &&
sudo dpkg -i vscode.deb &&
rm vscode.deb;