I am writing javascript and am currently doing simple exercises/programs. At times, I wish to run my file for testing purposes. I am aware I could create an HTML file and do this within the console. In Sublime, there exists a way to "build" the current file and immediately see the results (say, whatever is sent to console.log).

With VS Code, it seems that for every file I want to "build"/debug in this manner, I must manually change the launch.json file to reflect the name of the current program.

I have been researching a way around this, and I learned that there are variables like ${file} , but when I use that in the launch.json "program" attribute, for example:

"program": "${workspaceRoot}/${file}"

with or without the workspaceRoot part, I get the following error:

Attribute "program" does not exist" (file name here). 

Am I missing a simple way to accomplish this, or must I keep editing launch.json every time I want to run the file?

Thanks in advance!

1

4 Answers

Change to:

"program": "${file}"

4

For reference this is the full launch.json

{ "launch": { "version": "0.2.0", "configurations": [ { "name": "Node.js - Debug Current File", "type": "node", "request": "launch", "program": "${file}" } ] }
}

3

For a single file, you can skip the launch.json file entirely. Just click the green arrow in the debugger panel and choose Node as your environment.

From here.

2

There are many different ways you may need to access a file that are provided by Predefined variables:

Supposing that you have the following requirements:

• A file located at /home/your-username/your-project/folder/file.ext opened in your editor;
• The directory /home/your-username/your-project opened as your root workspace.

So you will have the following values for each variable:

• ${userHome} - /home/your-username
• ${workspaceFolder} - /home/your-username/your-project
• ${workspaceFolderBasename} - your-project
• ${file} - /home/your-username/your-project/folder/file.ext
• ${fileWorkspaceFolder} - /home/your-username/your-project
• ${relativeFile} - folder/file.ext
• ${relativeFileDirname} - folder
• ${fileBasename} - file.ext
• ${fileBasenameNoExtension} - file
• ${fileDirname} - /home/your-username/your-project/folder
• ${fileExtname} - .ext
• ${lineNumber} - line number of the cursor
• ${selectedText} - text selected in your code editor
• ${execPath} - location of Code.exe
• ${pathSeparator} - / on macOS or linux, \ on Windows

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