How To Install Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. 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 an Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).
• 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 Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 18.04.

Now we enable the VS Code repository and install the VS Code package through the command line:

wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Next, enable the Visual Studio Code repository:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/vscode stable main"

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

sudo apt update
sudo apt install code

Step 3. Starting Visual Studio Code.

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

$ code

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

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Visual Studio Code. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Visual Studio Code website.