No Hassle Visual Code Theming: Publishing an Extension

Creating your theme is the fun part. After you’re done, the next step is to publish your theme so you — and others — can enjoy your creation!

You’d think that publishing a VS Code extension is an easy process, but it’s not. (Maybe I’m used to the ease of publishing npm packages and take registries for granted.)

Anyway, you have to publish your theme in two places:

1. Visual Studio Marketplace for VS Code users
2. Open VSX for other text editors

You might also want to publish to npm for others to use your theme easily for other contexts — like syntax highlighting via Shiki.

Preparing your theme

When you name your theme, you cannot put it under a scope like @scope/theme-name. Doing so will prevent you from publishing to Open VSX.

So, make sure your theme name is unscoped. (The theme word is optional):

{
  "name": "twilight-cosmos-theme",
}

To include an icon for your theme, you need a 128px square image file that can be accessible within your project. Put this under the icon property to point to the file:

{
  "icon": "path/to/icon.png",
}

Next, you want to ensure that you have a contributes key in your package.json file. VS Code and other text editors search for this to find themes.

{
  "contributes": {
    "themes": [
      {
        "label": "<Theme Name>",
        "uiTheme": "vs-dark",
        "path": "./<path-to-theme>.json"
      }
    ]
  },
}

Finally, you want to include several keywords to make your theme searchable on both VS Marketplace and Open VSX.

If you’re having problems with this, give AI your theme file and ask it to generate keywords for you 😉

{
  "keywords": [
    "theme",
    "dark theme",
    "twilight",
    "cosmos",
    "color-theme",
    "dark",
    "purple",
    "blue",
    "vscode-theme"
  ],
}

Publishing to Visual Studio Marketplace

Microsoft lets you publish to Visual Studio Marketplace via vsce if you have a personal access token from an Azure DevOps account.

Unfortunately, while creating this article, I encountered several problems setting up my Azure Devops account so I had to publish my extension via the manual route.

I’ll talk about both routes here.

Before publishing, you need to have a Visual Studio Marketplace account. So, sign up for one if you don’t have it yet.

Then do the following:

• Click on Publish Extension.
• Create a publisher account.

This step is needed for publishing both via vsce and the manual route.

Publishing via VSCE

For this to work, you need a Azure DevOps account. When you have that, you can create a Personal Access Token with these steps.

Note: It’s kinda irritating that you can’t have an lifetime access token with Azure DevOps. The maximum expiry is about one year later.

Also note: I had immense trouble creating my Azure DevOps account when I tried this — the back end kept hanging and I couldn’t find the right page, even when I copy-pasted the URL! Anyway, don’t be alarmed if this happens to you. You might just need to wait 1-2 days before you try again. It will work, eventually.

Once you have the personal access token, the rest of the steps is pretty straightforward.

First, you login to VSCE with your publisher ID that you created in Visual Studio Marketplace. (Insert the publisher ID, not the user ID!).

npx vsce login <publisher_id>

You’ll have to insert the access token when it asks you to. Then, run the next command to publish to the marketplace:

npx vsce publish

And you’re done!

Publishing manually

You’ll have to follow this route if you had problems with the personal access token like I did. Thankfully, it’s pretty straightforward as well. You can go to Visual Studio Marketplace and do the following:

• Click on Publish Extensions.
• Click New Extension.
• Use the vsce package command to package your extension as a visx file.
• Drag and drop the packaged visx file to upload your extension.

That’s it!

Getting verified on Visual Studio Code

If this is your first extension, you can only get “verified” on the Visual Studio Marketplace if your extension is at least six months old. So, if you want to get verified, set a reminder in six months and visit this page for more information.

Publishing to Open VSX

Thanks to Claude, I understood VS Code uses the Visual Studio Marketplace, but other text editors, like Cursor, use Open VSX.

Publishing to Open VSX is a bit more complex. You have to:

• Login to Open VSX via GitHub.
• Create an Eclipse Foundation account
• Link your GitHub repository to the Eclipse Foundation account.
• Sign their agreement.
• Create a publisher namespace and add this as the publisher in your package.json file.
• Create an access token.
• Then, finally, run npx ovsx publish to publish your package.

Likewise, ovsx will ask you for a personal access token when you try to publish for the first time. Thankfully, ovsx seems to have a lifetime access token seems so we don’t have to worry about it expiring.

Claiming the publisher namespace

This is essentially getting “verified” with Open VSX, but Open VSX calls it “claiming” the publisher namespace to get verified. Without harping on the language too much — this process takes a bit of to-and-fro but can be done now (instead of six months later).

Once you have created a publisher namespace, you’ll see a glaring warning sign:

To claim the publisher namespace, you need to create a GitHub issue with Eclipse Foundation and state that you want to claim the namespace.

In that issue:

• Include your GitHub repository (if you make it publicly available).
• Offer to give access temporarily to your GitHub repository (if it’s private).

And someone will handle the rest.

The team at Eclipse Foundation seems to be pretty responsive, so I wouldn’t worry about communication breakdown here.

Including images for your theme

It makes sense to include images to showcase your theme in the Readme.md file. Doing so allows users to get a sense of your theme colors before deciding whether they want to download it.

Unfortunately, both VS Marketplace and Open VSX do not allow you to use relative URLs — images will be broken if you use relative links from your repository — so you have to link to an absolute URL instead.

The best place to link to is the GitHub repository, as long as it is set to public access.

The URL will be something like this:

![Alt Text](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<github_username>/<repo-name>/master/<path-to-image>)

Wrapping up

It can be tedious to publish your first VS Code editor theme. But don’t let that process stop you from letting you — and others – enjoy your theme!

If you’re wondering, my first theme is called Twilight Cosmos. You can find out more about the creation process in my previous article.

Enjoy the (somewhat frustrating) process! You’ll finish it before you know it.

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