Otherwise, you will need to generate a key in order to authenticate your host machine as it accesses the remote development environment. If you already have an SSH key you would like to use for this machine, skip this step.

Link the development environment to VSCode.

Create the development environment and associate it with the key pair.

Generate SSH keys to authenticate communication between the VM and host.Setup is a pretty easy process once you know how it works. What’s more, it works everywhere VSCode works, so you can get the same Ubuntu environment on a Mac M2 as you could on a Windows 11 or Ubuntu machine. Multipass is designed to be ultra-quick to set up, and it allows you to automate all of the config you might otherwise need to do to get an Ubuntu machine up and running with VSCode. Multipass can act as a backend for this type of setup, and is a great solution in particular for developers on macOS due to its support for Apple silicon. Many software projects need to be built and run in Linux, and others just have better community support, reliability, or performance. Using a Linux remote environment with VSCode is also sometimes the only choice you have. As someone who has spent way too much time debugging path issues and sorting out conflicting versions of packages, I highly recommend keeping your development environments isolated.

It can keep your host machine environment much cleaner to use a Linux “server” with VSCode instead of using it within your host environment. There are a few reasons to use a Linux environment with VSCode.

Visual code linux