Until that eventual dreaded day.
Your workstation needs replaced!
It could be a hardware failure, OS re-image, or just a hardware refresh.
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Either way, you do not look forward to having to re-install and reconfigure VS Code.
What Does It Mean To Be Portable?
It also means items are written in the registry and the particular user’s local profile.
A portable app keeps all those files needed for the utility in one source folder.
All the apps and their parameters can be taken on the go to maximize their efficiency.
Why Would You Want to Make VS Code Portable?
It’s safe to say that almost every SysAdmin has been down this road at least once.
In today’s increasingly mobile world, where we work from could potentially have an ever-increasing ROI.
Starting Out Portable
It’s actually very easy to start out from scratch making VS Code portable.
Head on over to thedownloadpage for VS Code and grab the ZIP package for your OS/architecture.
Unzip the contents of the folder and drop it wherever you would like it to live long-term.
Feel free to change the folder name if you would like as well.
For this example, I have extracted the ZIP file to a USB drive and created the Data folder.
The Data folder will house all the specific configs to your portable version of VS Code.
By default, VS Code will utilize the system temp directory.
Once this is done, you’re ready to go!
Go ahead and install your needed extensions.
These, plus more are designed to help you code more efficiently on the fly.
You may also look into GitHub integration for VS Code prefs as well.
There are extensions out there for this.
This, by default, opens the PS prompt in the current user’s folder.
Migrate to Portable
You may be reading this and thinking to yourself, “Great!
I wish I would have known about this sooner.”
you might migrate your standard install to a portable one with just a few steps.
Update process
Updating the portable version of VS Code is just as simple.
Pull down the latest ZIP version and extract as in the previous steps.
It will know you are using the portable version and will get the latest portable version to swap.
You may want to keep the previous version folder around in the same spot.
The more extensions you have, the more this may be important.
To the budding PowerShell architect, this is all new and exciting.
