In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Visual Studio Code on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Visual Studio Code is an open-source cross-platform code editor developed by Microsoft. It has built-in debugging support, embedded Git control, syntax highlighting, code completion, integrated terminal, code refactoring, and snippets. Visual Studio Code is available free for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Visual Studio Code on a CentOS 8 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Visual Studio Code on CentOS 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf clean all
sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf update

Step 2. Installing Visual Studio Code on CentOS 8.

Now, we add GPG key Visual Studio Code repository:

sudo rpm --import https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc

Next, create the following repo file to enable the Visual Studio Code repository:

sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/vscode.repo <<ADDREPO
[code]
name=Visual Studio Code
baseurl=https://packages.microsoft.com/yumrepos/vscode
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc
ADDREPO

Then, update the packages and install Visual Studio using the following command:

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install code

Step 3. Starting Visual Studio Code.

Now that VS Code is installed on your CentOS system you can launch it either from the command line by typing

$ code

 or by clicking on the VS Code icon (Applications -> Accessories -> Visual Studio Code).

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Visual Studio Code. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Visual Studio in CentOS 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Visual Studio Code website.