Introducing Acorn VS Code Extension

After Acorn launched earlier this year, our community quickly asked for a Visual Studio Code extension. We set out to make working with Acorn without leaving VS Code possible. After hearing that feedback, we are excited to announce our first published release of the Acorn VS Code extension.

The Acorn VS Code extension supports snippets and syntax highlighting in Acornfiles. It supports running and building Acorn images, as well as browsing the Acorn apps and resources running in your cluster. All of this to make getting started with Acorn quick and easy. Let’s take a deeper look.

Acornfile language support

Acorn uses Acorn Markup Language (AML) to describe how containerized applications should be packaged and run. The extension adds syntax highlighting, making it easy to quickly find keywords and definitions in the Acornfile.

With snippet support, users can quickly start creating containers, volumes, and other primary Acorn application components. Start typing a keyword like containers or volumes and the drop down in VS Code will appear to allow the user to select the snippet block.

Browse Acorn apps and components

All from VS Code you can now see the Acorn apps and resources running in your cluster. You can expand the apps to see containers, volumes, secrets and endpoints. You can quickly launch a web browser to your published endpoints.

Develop, Run and Build Acorn images

While developing your application you can run your stack with Acorn in interactive mode to stream logs and have your code changes synced into the running containers. You can use the VS Code command palette to start Acorn apps interactively from the Acornfile in your application repo. If you need access to another Acorn image, you can run published Acorn images from a registry from within VS Code.

When you are ready to share your Acorn image you can build and push the Acorn image to a registry right from the VS Code command palette.

Develop with Acorn

If you are just getting started with Acorn, check out the quickstart guide to get up and running. You can also join one of our upcoming live trainings or meetups here. VS Code users developing with Acorn can try out the extension by installing from the VS Code Marketplace. Help make the Acorn VS Code extension better by opening issues and providing feedback on our GitHub Repo.