4

I'm trying to figure out how to do my web development on Windows using the relatively new Windows Subsystem for Linux (Bash on Ubuntu on Windows) in conjunction with Visual Studio Code. I've configured the IDE to use the Bash in its integrated terminal, and I've set the project up such that the files are accessible in both the Linux and Windows file system.

The last thing I want to get set up is to get the IDE set up with NodeJS, but not NodeJS for Windows. I want it to use an installation of NodeJS in the Linux Subsystem. Does anyone know if it's possible to point VS Code to the Node installation in the Linux Subsystem?

phuclv
  • 37,963
  • 15
  • 156
  • 475
Captain Stack
  • 3,572
  • 5
  • 31
  • 56

3 Answers3

1

This was a stumbling block for me too, until I found out that the real problem is that there's a pathing issue with WSL that creates a conflict if you already have NPM installed for Windows. Hopefully you've already figured this out yourself, but for anyone else who hits this, I'm copying in an excerpt from my longer guide on Visual C + WSL that's specific to this problem alone.

Given what you've said, I'll assume you already have node and NPM already installed in WSL's Ubuntu.

Using your favorite CLI editor (such as nano, vim, emacs, cat and sed… etc), open your ~/.profile

nano ~/.profile

Note: do NOT attempt to edit Linux files using Windows tools. (Thanks to @david-c-rankin's comment for the official link with the bold red text explaining this) If you don't want to use a CLI editor for this in the terminal, see the bottom of the answer this is excerpted from for a link on how to get a GUI one running.

Currently, the default bash PATH variable in WSL is

PATH="$HOME/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Which is injecting the windows path after the first two binary directories. Unfortunately, this doesn't result in /usr/bin being used before the windows installed npm, so add that before the final $PATH:

PATH="$HOME/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH"

Save out, and then either reload the terminal or just source the path file

source ~/.profile
taswyn
  • 4,463
  • 2
  • 20
  • 34
1

VSCode (v1.18) now has better WSL support for Node:

I use nvm to install Node on Ubuntu, although it should work fine if you install it normally.

e.g.

nvm install 9.2.0
nvm alias default 9.2.0

From the VSCode docs

If you want to run Node.js in the Linux subsystem on Windows (WSL), you can use the approach from above as well. However to make this even simpler, we've introduced a useWSL flag to automatically configure everything so that Node.js runs in the Linux subsystem and source is mapped to files in your workspace.

Here is the simplest debug configuration for debugging hello.js in WSL: { "type": "node", "request": "launch", "name": "Launch in WSL", "useWSL": true, "program": "${workspaceFolder}/hello.js" }

Red Riding Hood
  • 1,932
  • 1
  • 17
  • 36
0
  • I opened bash outside of the vs code and run the following command, to install node.

sudo apt install nodejs-legacy

and I'm able to run node with bash in vs code.

Emmy
  • 21
  • 1
  • 3