====== Visual Studio Code (VS Code) ======

<WRAP important round>
It is not allowed or supported to Visual Studio Code to our HPC. This is because VS Code works by launching processes on the target machine (the HPC login nodes), which takes up resource and are often left running after a broken connection or just by accident.  

This causes performance issues for other users of the HPC login nodes.
</WRAP>

You can use VS Code to develop locally on your own machine, but using VS Code to edit directly on the HPC facility has proven to be problematic as highlighted above. Other editors / IDE applications with SSH connectivity do not exhibit the problems we have encountered with VS Code. If you //want// to edit your files directly on the HPC, please use an alternative editor. Some editors/IDE applications with SSH/SFTP connectivity include:

   * Sublime (with optional SSH plugin)
   * jEdit
   * Netbeans
   * Eclipse

On Linux or Mac OS you can also use sshfs / fuse to map the HPC filesystem to a local directory for easier editing of files. Alternatively, the commercial [[started:data_transfer#expandrive|Expandrive]] package can also facilitate this.

Outside of an editor with SSH/SFTP support, the reccomended workflow is:

  - Develop and test skeleton code in your local IDE (e.g. VS Code), then upload to HPC
  - Test run this skeleton code with an small example data set on the login node.  
  - When test code runs with the example data, create the scheduling batch file and test that the code runs as a scheduled job.  
  - Fully develop and test code locally before moving the code to HPC

We recommend **using Git** ([[training:index|see our training page to learn more]]) to manage your code (VS Code interfaces well with Git).  Clone the repository in your project directory and use 'git pull' to bring down the latest version of your code.

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