Should I commit the .vscode folder to source control?

Question

Is the .vscode folder meant to be committed to source control?

In a fresh project, the folder is empty, except the settings.json file. What kind of things would go into this folder? Is it machine-specific, developer-specific like the .vs folder and thus not be committed? Or should all developers share this folder and thus it should be committed?

The comment at the top of the file .vscode/settings.json states:

// Place your settings in this file to overwrite default and user settings.
{
}

This seems to imply that the folder should contain project-specific settings and thus be included in source. Also, this post on UserVoice seems to imply some typings would go in there, also suggesting that it should be committed.

Answer 1

Check in the .vscode folder if you want to share settings, task configuration and debug configuration with the team. I think generally it makes sense to share settings (e.g. whitespace vs tabs) with the team if you want to enforce settings in a team. We in the VS Code team share debug and task specific settings as well because we want our team to have the same set of debug targets and task targets for VS Code.

Btw you do not need to have a .vscode folder in your project for settings. You can also configure settings on a user level.

Answer 2

Summing up other answers

Recommendation is to generally exclude .vscode folder, but leave select JSON files that allow other developers to recreate shared settings.

Examples of settings to include:

• Language specific test configurations to run the test suite(s) (settings.json)
• Extension settings for linters and code formatting tools to enforce the language rules used in this repo (settings.json)
• Run and debug configurations (launch.json)
• Shared tasks - if managed with VS Code (tasks.json)

Note that some settings can be stored in the user settings or workspace file, or transferred to it from the .vscode folder. See below.

---

Sample .gitignore code

Here are the settings, as suggested at https://gitignore.io. You can search for "VisualStudioCode" there to get the latest recommended .gitignore file. I use this website as a starting point for .gitignore for most of my new repos:

# Created by https://www.gitignore.io/api/visualstudiocode
# Edit at https://www.gitignore.io/?templates=visualstudiocode

### VisualStudioCode ###
.vscode/*
!.vscode/settings.json
!.vscode/tasks.json
!.vscode/launch.json
!.vscode/extensions.json

### VisualStudioCode Patch ###
# Ignore all local history of files
**/.history

# End of https://www.gitignore.io/api/visualstudiocode

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In the above .gitignore file, the .vscode/* line (note: some debate on whether the * should be included - see comments) says to exclude everything in the .vscode folder (but apparently not sub-folders), but then the !.vscode/a_specific_file lines tell git to "not" ignore some specific files in that folder (settings.json, launch.json, etc.). The end result is that everything is excluded in the .vscode folder except for the files specifically named in one of those other lines.

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Other Factors

Including the .vscode folder in your repo doesn't actually hurt anyone that uses a different IDE (or text/code editor).

However, it may hurt other people using VS Code, if these files include generic settings that require something specific to your environment, that is different in their environment - like the absolute path the repo is installed in. The key is to avoid saving settings that are custom to your local environment, only sharing those that can be used by everyone.

For example, if IDE setting files have absolute paths to the repo or any files/libraries, etc., then that is bad, don't share. But if all the references are relative, then they should work for anyone using the repo (although, be careful about path specification differences between Windows/Unix..).

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About User, Workspace, and Folder settings

Note: the settings files in the .vscode folder are generally updated when you make changes to the folder version of the settings - but this appears to depend on how individual extensions are coded, because I've run across multiple exceptions to this rule.

• If you make changes to the user settings, they are usually stored elsewhere (location depends on OS settings).
• If you make changes to the workspace settings, they are usually stored in the *.code-workspace file that you are currently using. If you don't have a workspace (you directly opened a folder instead), then they will likely go to the .vscode folder, but, overall, this may depend on the extension that owns the setting anyway.

So, you should generally put custom settings for your personal PC into the user settings, and put generic settings into the workspace or folder settings.

• Exception example: the Python extension updates .vscode/settings.json to have an absolute path of the current folder under the pythonpath setting, which makes it specific to the current PC.

Answer 3

Between commit/ignore there is third clever option: commit with .default suffix.

For example you can add settings.json to .gitignore, and commit settings.json.default, much like it is common practice (in my team) with .env files.

I took this advice from video Commit editor settings to version control? by Mattias Petter Johansson

Answer 4

• never commit .vscode/settings.json - with the weird exception of search.exclude . If you really need to, be very careful of putting only settings particular of your project that you want to enforce to other developers.
• for validation, formatting, compilation use other files like package.json, .eslint, tsconfig.json, etc
• The only .vscode that makes sense to include are complex launch configs for debugging.
• Be careful, there could be a third party extension in your system that could put private information there !

What you can't do is copy & paste the whole settings.json contents file to .vscode/settings.json. I'm seeing some people doing this and committing the file is an atrocity. In that case you will not only break others workspace but worst, you will be enforcing settings to users that you shouldn't like aesthetics, UI, experience. You probably will break their environments because some are very system dependent. Imagine I have vision problems so my editor.* user settings are personalize and when I open your project the visuals change. Imagine I have vision problems s I need to personalize user editor.* settings to be able to work. I would be angry.

If you are serious don't commit .vscode/settings.json. In general, settings that could be useful for a particular project like validation, compilation, makes sense but in general you can use particular tools configuration files like .eslint, tsconfig.json, .gitignore, package.json. etc. I guess vscode authors just added the file for simplifying newcomer experience but if you want to be serious don't!

The only exception, and in very particular cases could be search.exclude

Answer 5

Why not just looking at the practice, other than the arguments around here?

One of the biggest project that keeps .vscode I found so far is Mozilla Firefox. It looks like the Firefox team shares their common tasks and recommended extensions.

So I guess it is not a bad idea to keep .vscode, as long as you know what you are doing.

I will update this post when I see other big projects that shares .vscode.

Answer 6

Same as other answers: no.

As an illustration, consider the approach chosen by Git 2.19 (Q3 2018), which adds a script (in contrib/) to help users of VSCode work better with the Git codebase.

In other words, generate the .vscode content (if it does not yet exist), don't version it.

See commit 12861e2, commit 2a2cdd0, commit 5482f41, commit f2a3b68, commit 0f47f78, commit b4d991d, commit 58930fd, commit dee3382, commit 54c06c6 (30 Jul 2018) by Johannes Schindelin (dscho).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 30cf191, 15 Aug 2018)}

contrib: add a script to initialize VS Code configuration

VS Code is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Among other languages, it has support for C/C++ via an extension, which offers to not only build and debug the code, but also Intellisense, i.e. code-aware completion and similar niceties.

This patch adds a script that helps set up the environment to work effectively with VS Code: simply run the Unix shell script contrib/vscode/init.sh, which creates the relevant files, and open the top level folder of Git's source code in VS Code.

Answer 7

The answer is "NO",because .vscode folder is for this editor and you should't push these personal settings to repo in case of confusing others ,so you can add it to your project's .gitignore file to ignore the changes

Answer 8

A simple way to keep your settings without commit it in your project git repository is creating a workspace and add folder into it.

When do you create a workspace, you need to save a file code-workspace. This file contains custom settings, just save this file out of the git repository and will be free to add .vscode into .gitignore file.