Testing a Visual Studio Code Extension inside GitHub Actions

February 12, 2024 #vscode #github #codequality

Visual Studio Code can be customized and enhanced through the Extension API, as I have done with the Cedar policy language for Visual Studio Code.

Running automated tests using GitHub Actions gave me errors like these:

Failed to connect to the bus: Could not parse server address: Unknown address type (examples of valid types are “tcp” and on UNIX “unix”)

Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization

Below are select sections from my build_and_test.yml that removed these error messages.

The GitHub Action is running on ubuntu-latest.

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

Running tests requires downloading a version of Visual Studio Code, so I called the REST API to get the latest stable version.

      - name: Find VS Code stable release version
        id: code-stable
        run: |
          echo "VSCODE_VERSION=`curl --silent https://update.code.visualstudio.com/api/releases/stable | jq -r '.[0]'`" >> "$GITHUB_OUTPUT"

Then I used the Cache action to cache that download and improve workflow execution time on subsequent runs.

      - name: Cache VS Code download
        uses: actions/cache@v4
        with:
          path: |
            .vscode-test
          key: vscode-test-cache-${{ steps.code-stable.outputs.VSCODE_VERSION }}

I don’t know much about D-Bus (short for “Desktop Bus”) other that it gave me a lot of errors. I searched and eventually a dbus-daemon command that worked. Then I found how to disable GPU acceleration by adding "disable-hardware-acceleration": true to an argv.json file.

      - name: Test using VS Code
        # commands before `xvfb-run -a npm run test` avoid these ERROR messages:
        # - Failed to connect to the bus: Could not parse server address: Unknown address type (examples of valid types are "tcp" and on UNIX "unix")
        # - Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization
        run: |
          export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u)
          export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/bus
          dbus-daemon --session --address=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS --nofork --nopidfile --syslog-only &
          mkdir ~/.vscode && echo '{ "disable-hardware-acceleration": true }' > ~/.vscode/argv.json
          xvfb-run -a npm run test

Now I get clean runs, and if you are reading this, I hope you do as well.