Zowe Explorer for VSCode fails to start

Products

• Brightside

Issue/Introduction

When trying to add connections to zowe explorer in vscode the below errors pop up:

Error running command zowe.uss.addSession: command 'zowe.uss.addSession' not found. This is likely caused by the extension that contributes zowe.uss.addSession.

Error running command zowe.ds.addSession: command 'zowe.ds.addSession' not found. This is likely caused by the extension that contributes zowe.ds.addSession.

Environment

Release : 4.0

vscode-extension-for-zowe-2.6.2

Cause

Site has specific process to install zowe explorer:   One user install the zowe explorer in VSCode, pass the \.vscode\extensions folder over to packaging team who then install VSCode and copy the extensions folder to all the user's system. 

Users then open VSCode with ".....\Microsoft VS Code\Code.exe" --extensions-dir "C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code\mainframe_extensions"

Zowe explorer log shows the VS Code extensions folder (C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code\mainframe_extensions) is read-only in user's environment, and Zowe Explorer (2.6.2) requires write access to this folder to be able to write log files. 

 

 

Resolution

New version of zowe explorer provided by Broadcom (fix will be included in the upcoming zowe explorer release v2.8.0), user can install this new version of zowe explorer via "Extensions: Install from VSIX" in the command palette, then copy this new version of the extension to the shared folder "C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code\mainframe_extensions" managed by site packaging team.

To configure Zowe Explorer to store logs and temporary files in a different location, there are 2 settings need to change in VS Code. The paths should be set to a location that user has write access to.

After installing the new version of the extension and configuring these 2 settings, user should be able to relaunch VS Code and use Zowe Explorer despite the "mainframe_extensions" folder being read-only.