Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is an interactive development environment (IDE) or simply, a code editor. You may hear Visual Studio Code referenced as VSCode or just code in the industry. VSCode is free to use for many types of development and supports various extensions for syntax checking and highlighting depending on the code language you are working with. For this lab, you will be working primarily with Python and YAML file types. One of the interactive aspects of an IDE when working with Python is being able to select a runtime interpreter, e.g. Python 3.8.2 or Python 3.9.2. In this lab, we will take this a step further by using VSCode's remote connection functionality.

The VSCode application that is opened on your desktop computers has its documents and terminal connected back to an Ubuntu VM in RTP, North Carolina. VSCode is providing the code editor frontend while the Ubuntu VM is acting as the file hosting and runtime environment. In essence, you will be developing locally, but running remotely.

Step 1 - Introduction to Development Environment

Navigate to your VSCode application. Your VSCode screen should look very similar to the screenshot shown below.

A few things to note:

1. The SSH connection to the remote Ubuntu VM
2. The terminal prompt is the remote Ubuntu VM and NOT the local Windows desktop computer
3. As you create files throughout the lab, the files will show in the Documents Explorer pane
4. When you execute Python or Ansible through the lab, that will be done from the Terminal command line

Continue to the next section to setup your Python development environment using pyenv on the Ubuntu VM.