command-server README

Creates an http server that exposes a REST api to execute commands.

Features

On startup, spawns an http server listening for commands to execute. Each running VSCode editor workspace runs its own server, each of which pick a different random free port on which to listen. The port of the server for the active editor is written to a file named vscode-port in the operating system's default directory for temporary files.

Accepts requests of the form:

POST /execute-command HTTP/1.1

{
  "commandId": "some-command-id",
  "args": [
    "some-argument"
  ]
}

Upon receiving the above, this extension would run the command some-command-id with argument "some-argument".

If you'd like the server to wait for the command to finish before responding, pass waitForFinish=true.

If you'd like the server to wait for the command to finish and then respond with the command return value encoded as JSON, pass expectResponse=true.

Note that the server is bound to localhost, so it will only accept commands from processes running on the same host as VSCode.

Python example

import requests
from pathlib import Path
from tempfile import gettempdir


port_file_path = Path(gettempdir()) / "vscode-port"
port = port_file_path.read_text()

response = requests.post(
    f"http://localhost:{port}/execute-command",
    json={
        "commandId": "some-command-id",
        "args": ["some-argument"],
    },
    timeout=(0.05, 3.05),
)
response.raise_for_status()

Known issues

• The server won't respond until the extension is loaded. This may be obvious, but just be aware that if you have other extensions that take a while to load, the server might not respond for a little while after you load an editor window until everything is fully loaded.

Release Notes