In last week’s post, I mentioned off-hand that we could stop VSCode from launching a web browser when starting a debug session on the back-end of our application. This is going to be a quick post on how to stop that browser launch. The following are the previous Web Template Studio related posts if you want to catch up.
Create an Application with Web Template Studio
Debug ASP.NET Core Back-end Created from Web Template Studio
Launch Configurations
If you recall from last week to run our back-end we used the debug tab in VSCode and then hit the Run button for the .NET Core Launch (web) configuration.
The options that are available for running in VSCode are controlled by a launch.json file found in the .vscode directory. The following screenshot is the launch.json for the sample project from last week.
Stop the Browser
To stop the browser from opening delete the serverReadyAction section in the specific configuration you are dealing with. From the sample in the screenshot above the following is what would be removed from the .NET Core Launch (web) configuration.
// Enable launching a web browser when ASP.NET Core starts. For more information: https://aka.ms/VSCode-CS-LaunchJson-WebBrowser
"serverReadyAction": {
"action": "openExternally",
"pattern": "\\bNow listening on:\\s+(https?://\\S+)"
},
With the above removed hitting the run button for this configuration will no longer launch a browser, but the rest of the debugging experience will remain as it was before.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, this will help remove a little annoyance in the development. For more details on the serverReadyAction check out the docs. I also recommend checking out the full docs for launch.json to get a good feel of what all is possible.
Also published on Medium.