Visual Studio Code – How can I download a .vsix version of an extension?

Please see this GitHub recipe.

In older Stackoverflow answers, I saw the examples of Visual Studio Marketplace products with links to the .vsix files of the extensions. I don’t think that these files are presently available unless some author decides to publish one.

Not to worry. If nothing else works, you can easily recreate a .vsix.

To do so, you need to

• Click on the extension repository on the page of the extension product on Visual Studio Marketplace.
• Load the repository page and then clone or download the extension code to your local directory.
• In your local directory with the copy of the product, command: vsce package.

This way, you can recreate a .vsix version of the package not only for the version presented at the Visual Studio Marketplace but for any earlier release.

To use vsce, you need to have node.js, npm and installed vsce itself. You can find everything in the documentation published, in particular, on the documentation page Publishing Extensions. In your case, you want to use this documentation not for publishing, but only for the creation of a .vsix package. And that package can later be used for alternative ways of installation, for example, off-line.

It looks like you are talking about Visual Studio Code extension. If so, you may think of yet another, alternative method of getting the extension product files. It works if you have VSCode with an already installed extension. In this case, you need to locate your VSCode data use the directory data/extension. The exact location of this directory depends on the platform and the type of VSCode installation. In particular, if you have a portable VSCode installation, you will find data/extension in the VSCode installation directory, a sibling directory to bin. Inside data/extension directory, you can locate the directory of the extension you need and run vsce package.