How to fix VS Code remote SSH for NixOS target

Published: 01/01/2021 Last updated: 18/07/2023

When you install VS Code with its remote-SSH plugin, and logs into a shell via SSH. VS Code will install its backend on the remote machine (at ~/.vscode-server) and turns the client into a front-end (after all, it’s just an Electron app).

However, VS Code depends on an much older version of nodejs, and so you need to manually relink the node exectubale to that version. In other words:

Install nodejs-12_x via nix-env or home-manager
rm -f the node executable in ./vscode-server/bin/<hash>/node
Replace it with symlink nix eval nixpkgs.nodejs-12_x.outPath

References

Github issue #648 in 2019
Github issue #3476 in Aug 2020