Visual Studio Code Install

Step 1. Install containers extension If you haven’t already, you need to first install Visual Studio Code on your host computer.

Start a new VSCode window, and follow these steps to install the Dev Containers plugin:

1. Click into Extensions tab on the left vertical bar of your VSCode window. It is usually the fifth from the top down.
2. In the search bar, type in “Dev containers”.
3. Usually the first option that came up is the one we want, click into it.
4. Make sure it is the extension Dev Containers we are looking for. Click the Install button.

Step 2. Attach to the running container After installation, you should see a small (blue or green) button in the bottom-left corner of the window. Click it and in the new pop-up window, click Attach to Running Container…

Select the one with the name /moya-container, or use the search bar if you have too many containers:

If you don’t see moya-container here, make sure the Container is up and running.

After selecting the moya-container container, a new window should pop up. The bottom-left corner should display something similar to this:

Step 3. Open project directory

On the top toolbar, click on File and select Open Folder…, and a new pop-up window should appear:

Here you can browse the Container’s filesystem.

Click into the shared folder and choose the newly cloned project folder, then click on OK button. VSCode will then reload and use the folder you just chose as the working directory.

Again on the top toolbar, click on Terminal and select New Terminal, a terminal section will appear at the bottom of the window. You should see a layout similar to this:

On the left, the Explorer section shows all the files under this directory;

On the bottom, the Terminal section is a shell for you to execute commands inside the Docker Container;

The main section is the file editor. Any file you chose in the Explorer section is opened and displayed here.

Let’s try running the code we pulled from our repo to make sure it works. In the exlporer section on the left click on the repo folder to expand it. Inside you should see the check_setup folder. Click on check_setup to expand it and see the files in it. You should be able to see the file hello.c and a file called Makefile.

If you click on the hello.c program to view it, you can see that it just prints things out and exists to verify that your setup worked. To further test our code, lets try to compile and run it.

In the terminal type cd 26fa-cis5480-xyz and then cd check_setup to move the terminal’s current directory from shared to the check_setup directory inside of your repo.

Once you have done this, you can try running the command make which should compile hello.c into a program called hello. Try running the program by doing ./hello in the terminal and you should be able to see the message it prints!

If you get an error compiling your code, try running the following commands one after the other:

apt-get install -y lsb-release
apt-get install -y gnupg
apt-get install -y software-properties-common
wget https://apt.llvm.org/llvm.sh
chmod +x llvm.sh
sudo ./llvm.sh 19
rm llvm.sh

If that does not work, then please post on ed.

To learn more about the usage of Visual Studio Code, you can refer to available resources online, such as this one: Getting started with Visual Studio Code.