How to use VSCode remotely to edit files on your Raspberry Pi

08 May 2021

This is yet another very-short-post™. I really like VSCode because I think it speeds up lots of things. However, when I’m developing stuff on the Raspberry Pi, I’m often forced to keep moving files back & forth or just use vim. So, today I decided to google a little bit and I found a simple solution: sshfs

Install it (Debian-based Linux):

$ sudo apt-get install sshfs

You don’t even need to be root. In my situation, I created a dir under home called “sshfs” and from inside that dir (rpi0edgetpu.local is the avahi name of my RPI0, I could have just put the IP):

$ sshfs pi@rpi0edgetpu.local:/home/ rpi0/

Now, you just need to call vscode from the sshfs dir and you are good to go:

$ code .

After you are done with your work, umount sshfs drive:

$ umount rpi0

I noticed VSCode wasn’t happy when I called it from the rpi0 dir I got this message:

cannot open path of the current working directory: Permission denied

Apparently, this was a problem related to snap since my VSCode was installed via snap.