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Visual Studio Code on Raspberry Pi

You can run Visual Studio Code on Raspberry Pi devices.

Raspberry Pi Logo

By downloading and using Visual Studio Code, you agree to the license terms and privacy statement.

Installation

Visual Studio Code is officially distributed via the Raspberry Pi OS (previously called Raspbian) APT repository, in both 32-bit and 64-bit variants.

You can install it by running:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install code

Running VS Code

After installing the VS Code package, you can run VS Code by typing code in a terminal or launching it via the Programming menu.

Visual Studio Code under the Programming menu on Raspberry Pi

Updates

Your Raspberry Pi should handle updating VS Code in the same way as other packages on the system:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade code

You can always check when a new release is available in our Updates page.

System requirements

VS Code is supported on these Raspberry Pi models running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS:

  • Raspberry Pi 3 Model B/B+
  • Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
  • Raspberry Pi 400

While 1 GB of memory (RAM) meets the minimum system requirements, users will benefit from installing VS Code on a Raspberry Pi 4 with more memory.

First-generation Raspberry Pi modules and Raspberry Pi Zero are not supported as they only include an ARMv6 CPU.

Workaround for poor performance

VS Code on Raspberry Pi 4 may be slow with the default setup. A workaround is to disable hardware (GPU) acceleration in VS Code:

  1. Open the VS Code argv.json file using the Preferences: Configure Runtime Arguments command.
  2. Set "disable-hardware-acceleration": true.
  3. Restart VS Code.

The "disable-hardware-acceleration": true runtime argument switch has the effect of passing the --disable-gpu command-line argument on VS Code startup.

Next steps

Once you have installed VS Code, these topics will help you learn more about it:

10/03/2024