Connecting Desktop VS Code

If you prefer to use Visual Studio Code (VS Code) as your editor, you can connect VS Code to Unity and run your Jupyter Notebooks through VS Code. In order to do so, you need to establish an SSH connection to Unity using an SSH client first. If you haven’t already, follow the steps in the SSH Connection guide.

Once you have established an SSH connection to Unity, you need to configure SSH and start an interactive job. Then, you can connect the VS Code Desktop App to Unity. Once connected, you can also install additional VS Code extensions remotely. The following sections will guide you through these processes.

Configure SSH

To connect VS Code to Unity you need to install VS Code’s Remote-SSH extension and configure your ssh client to hop through the login node to a compute node.

To configure your ssh client, add the following lines to your ~/.ssh/config file:

Host unity
Hostname unity.rc.umass.edu
User unity_user_name
ForwardAgent yes
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_privkey.key

Host *.unity.rc.umass.edu
User unity_user_name
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_privkey.key
ProxyJump unity

Start an interactive job

After configuring your ssh client, you must start an interactive job with the resources you need. Make note of the hostname since you will need it for the next step.

For example:

$ salloc --gpus=1 --partition=gpu-preempt -q short -t 4:00:00
salloc: Granted job allocation ...
salloc: Waiting for resource configuration
salloc: Nodes gpu001 are ready for job
$ hostname -f
gpu001.unity.rc.umass.edu

In the example above, the hostname is gpu001.unity.rc.umass.edu.

Connect VS Code

Once you have started your interactive job, you can connect VS Code to Unity.

To do so, select Remote-SSH: Connect to host from the command palette and type in the hostname from above (e.g., cpu001.unity.rc.umass.edu).

Install additional VS Code extensions remotely

For some extensions to work properly, you must install them on the server even if you already have them installed locally.

1. In VS Code, choose View and then Extensions from the menu. The Extensions panel appears on the left.

2. Scroll through your extensions and click buttons that say Install on SSH: …

3. To run Jupyter Notebooks, install the extensions Jupyter, Jupyter Renderers, and Python on SSH.