Use the Application Accelerator Visual Studio Code extension

This topic describes how to use the Application Accelerator Visual Studio Code extension to explore and generate projects from the defined accelerators in Tanzu Application Platform (commonly known as TAP) using VS Code.

The Application Accelerator Visual Studio Code extension lets you explore and generate projects from the defined accelerators in Tanzu Application Platform using VS Code.

Dependencies

• To use the VS Code extension, the extension must access the Tanzu Developer Portal URL. For information about how to retrieve the Tanzu Developer Portal URL, see Retrieving the URL for the Tanzu Developer Portal.

• (Optionally) To use Git repository provisioning during project creation in the VS Code extension, you must enable GitHub repository creation in the Application Accelerator plug-in. For more information, see Create an Application Accelerator Git repository during project creation.

Install the extension

Use the following steps to install the Application Accelerator Visual Studio Code extension:

1. Open Visual Studio Code.
2. Open the command palette and enter Extensions.
3. Click Extensions: Install Extensions.
4. The Extensions view opens on the left side of your screen. In the search box, enter Tanzu.
5. Click Tanzu App Accelerator.
6. Click Install.

Configure the extension

Before using the extension, you need follow the next steps:

1. Go to VS Code settings - click Code > Preferences > Settings > Extensions > Tanzu App Accelerator.

2. Look for the setting Tap Gui Url.

3. Add the Tanzu Application Platform GUI URL.

   

   An example URL: https://tap-gui.myclusterdomain.myorg.com. If you have access to the Tanzu Application Platform cluster that is running the Tanzu Developer Portal, you can run the following command to determine the fully-qualified domain name:

   kubectl get httpproxy tap-gui -n tap-gui
   

Using the extension

To use the VS Code extension:

1. Click the Tanzu Application Accelerator extension icon in the Activity Bar to explore the defined accelerators.

   

2. Choose any of the defined accelerators, fill in the options under Configure Accelerator, and click Next.

   

3. Review your settings and click Generate Project.

Retrieving the URL for the Tanzu Developer Portal

If you have access to the Tanzu Application Platform cluster that is running Tanzu Developer Portal, run the following command to determine the fully-qualified domain name:

kubectl get httpproxy tap-gui -n tap-gui

Example output:

NAME      FQDN                                      TLS SECRET     STATUS   STATUS DESCRIPTION
tap-gui   tap-gui.tap.tapdemo.myorg.com             tap-gui-cert   valid    Valid HTTPProxy

Download and Install Self-Signed Certificates from the Tanzu Developer Portal

To enable the Application Accelerator extension for VS Code to communicate with a Tanzu Developer Portal instance that is secured using TLS, you must download and install the certificates locally.

Prerequisites

yq is required to process the YAML output.

Procedure

1. Find the name of the Tanzu Developer Portal certificate. The name of the certificate might look different to the following example.

   kubectl get secret -n cert-manager
   

   NAME                                           TYPE                             DATA   AGE
   canonical-registry-secret                      kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson   1      18d
   cert-manager-webhook-ca                        Opaque                           3      18d
   postgres-operator-ca-certificate               kubernetes.io/tls                3      18d
   tanzu-sql-with-mysql-operator-ca-certificate   kubernetes.io/tls                3      18d
   tap-ingress-selfsigned-root-ca                 kubernetes.io/tls                3      18d <------- This is the certificate that is needed
   

2. Download the certificate:

   kubectl get secret -n cert-manager tap-ingress-selfsigned-root-ca -o yaml | yq '.data."ca.crt"' | base64 -d > ca.crt
   

3. Install the certificate on your local system and fully restart any applications that uses the certificate. After restarting, the application uses the certificate to communicate with the endpoints using TLS. For more information, see Installing a root CA certificate in the trust store in the Ubuntu documentation.

   macOS

   Run:

   sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustRoot -k /Library/Keychains/System.keychain ca.crt
   

   Windows

   Complete the following steps:

   1. Use Windows Explorer to navigate to the directory where the certificate was downloaded and click on the certificate.
   2. In the Certificate window, click Install Certificate….
   3. Change the Store Location from Current User to Local Machine. Click Next.
   4. Select Place all certificates in the following store, click Browse, and select Trusted Root Certification Authorities
   5. Click Finish.
   6. A pop-up window stating The import was successful. is displayed.