Since its release in 2016 Visual Studio Code has established itself as a firm favourite with developers. In the 2019 StackOverflow Developers survey, Visual Studio Code was voted the most popular Development Environment.
Visual Studio Code is a code editor with syntax highlighting, debugging and GIT integration. It is made by Microsoft and runs on Mac, Linux and Windows. It’s also Open Source. Crucially it also supports extensions and in January 2020 an extension for Splunk was released. The extension provides:
- syntax highlighting + more for .conf files
- ability to run Splunk searches / reports
- python code debugging features such as breakpoints, step over / step into, variable inspection
Installation
Running on a Mac I wanted to install Visual Studio Code and the Splunk Extension, then setup editing of config files on Linux instances running in VMs local to my Mac. Here’s the steps:
- Download and install Visual Studio Code
- Visual Studio Code downloads as a zip file and once decompressed there is an executable, not a dmg so it’s not an installer. I just moved the “Visual Studio Code” executable into the Applications folder
- From the launch screen, look at the Customize section, in Tools and Languages click more
- A list of all the available extensions appears and you can simply add the term “splunk” to the existing search filter
- There were five options available with “Splunk Extension” with an author of “Splunk” being the one we are looking for
- Click on “Splunk Extensions” then Install
- Once installed there was a notification that selecting a Python Interpreter was required – I had a few options available but chose the /usr/local/bin/python3 option
Connect to Splunk Server
To connect to a remote server via SSH another extension is required, from within Visual Studio Code:
- Click on the extensions icon on the left hand side
- search for and install “Remote – SSH”
- In the bottom left there is now a green icon that allows access to the Remote – SSH command
- You can then go ahead and setup connections to your splunk server – you will want to connect as the user that owns the config files (usually splunk) and you do this using username / password or ssh keys
- Opening a file is then straightforward and you can navigate through the file system to find the file you want to edit
Links
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code Splunk Extension
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