Confused about how VSCode extensions versioning works in NixOS

[clinton]

I’m managed to install the haskell.haskell extension through my configuration.nix file (I know this probably should be a user, not system wide thing but I’m not up to splitting the config like that yet).

However, it’s at version 1.7.1, whereas the current version is 1.8.

This leads me to a few questions:

1. How do I get nix to install the latest version?
2. How is it okay to even specify an extension without a version? Isn’t NixOS about reproducibility? Or is there a “version” of NixOS I’m using, and that “snapshot” (for want of a better word) explicitly lists extension versions? Can I “update” that snapshot to get newer extension versions?
3. Can I specify the version of an extensions without going through the details like listing the SHA256 hash of it etc?

[NobbZ]

I assume you are using the channel approach to manage your system, which provides only limited reproducibility on its own.

A channel does indeed point to a “snapshot” of nixpkgs, which fixes all of its contents to certain revisions/versions.

You can update that snapshot by using nix-channel --update, which you might need to run as root to update the correct set of channels.

Sadly there is no built-in way to Tel the channel to use a certain snapshot. It’s either the one that was set during last update, or the most recent one when you update the next time.

[Patrick]

You can pull directly from the VSCode Marketplace with pkgs.vscode-utils.extensionsFromVscodeMarketplace (see e.g. https://github.com/Smaug123/nix-dotfiles/blob/2463b3275b1dfb89137bd39ace6c6defa7a28e30/vscode-extensions.nix#L11 used in https://github.com/Smaug123/nix-dotfiles/blob/2463b3275b1dfb89137bd39ace6c6defa7a28e30/home.nix#L63). You still need to get the SHA right though (I usually do this by just setting the SHA to some nonsense value and then letting darwin-rebuild switch fail and tell me what it actually got).

[alexv]

@Patrick

You can pull directly from the VSCode Marketplace with pkgs.vscode-utils.extensionsFromVscodeMarketplace

Would that approach also work if I want to preinstall the extensions in code-server?

[jonringer]

It’s been on my very long to-do list, to try and make this more similar to vimPlugins, in which we can just have a top-level registry of extension names. And then just have some update logic to generate the latest of each.

[austin]

1. This could be a number of different things
   1. (as mentioned) You may need to update your channel
   2. (as mentioned) Switch to a different install method that isn’t using the nixpkgs package
   3. If it’s outdated at the source, create a PR to update the package or create an issue in nixpkgs requesting the package be updated
2. You don’t know it but you’re using a specific revision of nixpkgs already, and all packages are at a specific version in that revision
   • For example, see status.nixos.org, which shows what git commit each channel is at
   • Right now, nixos-unstable is at 98bb5b77c8c6666824a4c13d23befa1e07210ef1, so if that’s the channel you’re using and you’re up to date, you’d be using this haskell.haskell
   • As mentioned you can do nix-channel --update or I think it’s technically possible to manually pin to a specific version of nixpkgs
3. Don’t think specifically what you’re asking is possible, as you mentioned reproducibility and all