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[2022-08-22]: VS Code extension fails to activate after installation

Date​

2022-08-22 00:00 CEST

Summary​

  • VS Code extension failed to activate after installation.
  • Why?
  • It failed to get existing credentials from Secret Store.
  • Why?
  • Starting from version 1.69, VS Code changed the format of how they store credentials.
  • Why?
  • There was a bug in previous versions for Ubuntu and it seems like MacOS was affected too.

Authors​

Stepan Maksymchuk

Impact​

Only VS Code extension was affected.

Two people from the team reported this issue: Stepan and Mateusz.

Root Cause​

The VS Code team changed the way of how they store credentials using Secret Store.

Trigger​

Here are a vague steps to reproduce it (they were not verified in details):

  • have a VS Code version 1.68 or lower
  • install Archipelo extension
  • sign in using your account
  • update VS Code to the latest version (1.69 and higher)
  • re-install Archipelo extension
  • go to Archipelo extension's tab
  • click "Sign in" -> nothing happens
  • click the cog icon (settings) -> the error appears that the command is not found
  • if you open developer tools (Help -> Toggle developer tools) you will see errors like "cannot get password" there. console error

Detection​

Mateusz reported this issue firstly during showcase. Stepan hit it during investigation of other issues.

Resolution​

Here are manuals steps of how to resolve this issue on MacOS Monterey:

  • Open Keychain Access and search for vscodearchipelo.archipelo
  • Delete vscodearchipelo.archipelo from your keychain

Here are links that helped to understand and find a manual fix for it:

Timeline​

The timeline of the events related to the issue in form of the table:

TimeDescription
2022-08-17 13:00:00The issue was reported by Mateusz
2022-08-18 15:00:00The issue was hit by Stepan
2022-08-19 10:00:00Investigation of the issue started
2022-08-22 14:30:00Manual fix was found and tested by Stepan
2022-08-22 15:00:00Manual fix was applied by Mateusz

Action Items​

The following issue was created for investigation: #4038 The following issue was created to handle this error in the code and not crash the extension if we hit it in the future: #4048

Lessons Learned​

As we're working with VS Code API, we need to start pay attention to its releases too. However, I couldn't find any info about this fix in release notes of VS Code.