How To Install Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Visual Studio Code is a free cross-platform source-code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It supports debugging, embedded Git control, syntax highlighting, code completion and refactoring, and snippets.

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 20.04 (Focal Fossa) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
• 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 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

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
sudo apt install software-properties-common apt-transport-https wget

Step 2. Installing Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Method 1. Installing Visual Studio Code using Snap package.

sudo snap install --classic code

• Method 2. Installing Visual Studio Code using apt a command.

First, import the Microsoft GPG key:

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"

Once the apt repository is enabled, install the Visual Studio Code using the following command:

sudo apt install code

Step 3. Starting Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu.

Now that VS Code is installed on your Ubuntu system, In the Activities search bar type “Visual Studio Code” and click on the icon to launch the application or copy & paste the below command on your Terminal and execute it:

code

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Visual Studio Code. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Visual Studio Code website.