Overview of Tanzu Developer Tools for VS Code

VMware Tanzu Developer Tools for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is the official VMware Tanzu IDE extension for VS Code. The extension helps you develop with Tanzu Application Platform and enables you to rapidly iterate on your workloads on supported Kubernetes clusters that have Tanzu Application Platform installed.

Tanzu Developer Tools for VS Code currently supports VS Code on macOS and Windows OS for Java applications.

Extension features

The extension has the following features:

• Deploy applications directly from VS Code:

  Rapidly iterate on your applications on Tanzu Application Platform by deploying them as workloads directly from within VS Code.

• See code updates running on-cluster in seconds:

  With Live Update (facilitated by Tilt), you can deploy your workload once, save changes to the code and then see those changes reflected within seconds in the workload running on the cluster.

• Debug workloads directly on the cluster:

  Debug your application in a production-like environment by debugging on your Kubernetes cluster that has Tanzu Application Platform. An environment’s similarity to production relies on keeping dependencies and other variables updated.

• See workloads running on the cluster:

  From the Tanzu Workloads panel you can see any workload found within the cluster and namespace specified in the current kubectl context.

• Make a ready-to-code development environment by using development containers (alpha):

  Use developer containers to make a ready-to-code development environment. This enables developers to connect to a pre-configured development container that includes all Tanzu tools and IDE extensions required for development on Tanzu pre-installed.

• Connect to a sandbox cluster:

  You can connect to a Tanzu Application Platform sandbox instance from Tanzu Developer Tools for VS Code to try Tanzu Application Platform and see its benefits. To use Developer Sandbox and connect to it from your IDE, see the Tanzu Academy website.

Note

The new variation of Out of the Box (OOTB) Basic supply chains, which outputs Carvel packages to enable configuring multiple runtime environments, is not currently supported. For more information about the variation, see Carvel Package Supply Chains.