Java extensions for Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code provides many features as a Java language editor. You can also install VS Code extensions to add more features for Java development.

Tip: To see how to install and manage your extensions, refer to the extension documentation.

Thanks to the great Java community around VS Code, you can search for a large number of Java extensions easily within VS Code:

  1. Go to the Extensions view (kb(workbench.view.extensions)).
  2. Filter the extensions list by typing “java”.

Java Extensions

Recommended extensions

To help set up Java on VS Code, there is the Microsoft Java Extension Pack, which contains these popular extensions:

  1. Language Support for Java(TM) by Red Hat
  2. Debugger for Java
  3. Java Test Runner
  4. Maven for Java
  5. Java Dependency Viewer
  6. Visual Studio IntelliCode

Install the Java Extension Pack

There are also great extensions provided by Pivotal and Microsoft for Spring Boot development, including:

  1. Spring Boot Tools
  2. Spring Initializr Java Support
  3. Spring Boot Dashboard

Popular extensions from the community

Thanks to the great Java community around VS Code, there are many great community-created extensions as well. You can search for more Java extensions easily within the VS Code:

  1. Go to the Extensions view (kb(workbench.view.extensions)).
  2. Filter the extensions list by typing ‘java’.

Here are a few useful extensions:

  1. Tomcat
  2. Jetty
  3. Server Connector
  4. Community Server Connectors
  5. MicroProfile Extension Pack
  6. CheckStyle
  7. SonarLint
  8. Java Linter
  9. Java Decompiler
  10. Lombok Annotations Support
  11. Java Properties
  12. Bazel

We also appreciate contributions to any of our existing extensions and we hope you’ll create new Java extensions if you don’t find what you’re looking for in the Marketplace. We’re especially looking for help in areas such as support for Gradle and other Java application servers.

Recommended extensions with great Java support

We’d also like to recommend a couple of other extensions we believe are great to make VS Code even better for Java developers.

  1. Live Share is a great tool to use when you need to collaborate with someone else on the same code base.
  2. The Remote Development extensions let you use VS Code to access a container, a remote machine, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Extension for container development

You can use Docker extension to build docker images and work with image registries.

Kubernetes extension provides an explorer view to manage clusters and the nodes inside. It also provides advanced syntax support for editing Kubernetes manifest files.

Recommended extensions for cloud (Azure) development

Team development

  • The Azure Repos extension makes it easy to connect to your Azure DevOps Servers, allowing you to easily monitor builds, pull requests, and work items for your TFVC or Git source repositories.

Internet of Things

  • The Azure IoT Toolkit for VS Code makes it easy to develop and connect your IoT applications to Azure. With this extension, you can interact with Azure IoT Hub, manage devices connected to Azure IoT Hub, and develop with code snippets for Azure IoT Hub.

General tools

  • The Azure Tools Extension Pack provides a rich set of extensions that makes it easy to discover and interact with Azure services to power your applications.

  • The Azure Resource Manager Tools provide a rich editing experience for Azure Resource Manager deployment templates and template language expressions. For example, IntelliSense for TLE function names, parameter references, signature help, Go to Definition, Peek Definition, and Peek References as well as Errors and Warnings, making it quick and easy to author Azure Resource Manager templates in VS Code.

Visit Azure Extensions to find more Azure extensions.