VSCode NX Console + NixOS

[dsod]

After having some issues with the NX Console plugin in VSCode and solving it, I thought that I should share my findings here for anyone else experiencing the same issue.

The issue I had was that the NX Console client failed to start when starting VSCode, and the console gave me the following output:

Error: No prebuild or local build of @parcel/watcher found. Tried @parcel/watcher-linux-x64-glibc. Please ensure it is installed (don't use --no-optional when installing with npm). Otherwise it is possible we don't support your platform yet. If this is the case, please report an issue to https://github.com/parcel-bundler/watcher.

I verified that the package it tried to import in fact was installed in ~/.vscode-insiders/extensions/nrwl.angular-console-18.17.0/node_modules/@parcel/watcher-linux-x64-glibc, so I thought that it could be an issue with running the binary. Since the parcel watcher is a C++ binary that uses dynamic linking to load system libraries during runtime, this was likely the case. I did some cleanup:

• Re-installed the NX Console plugin (made sure the folder in ~/.vscode-insiders/extensions/nrwl.angular-console-18.17.0 was properly removed)
• Made sure that the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH was not set when starting vscode though the terminal (unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH. In my case, a pipewire setting in NixOS had set the variable, which could cause issues in steps further down)

Now I started getting another error: Error: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Verified the issue by running ldd ~/.vscode-insiders/extensions/nrwl.angular-console-18.17.0/node_modules/@parcel/watcher-linux-x64-glibc/watcher.node which gave me:

linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffedd7e7000)
**libstdc++.so.6 => not found**
libm.so.6 => /nix/store/ksk3rnb0ljx8gngzk19jlmbjyvac4hw6-glibc-2.38-44/lib/libm.so.6 (0x00007b62ef13e000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /nix/store/d8w5qfswmgxcjqwnmqw2v9r8amrvdlpb-xgcc-13.2.0-libgcc/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007b62ef119000)
libpthread.so.0 => /nix/store/ksk3rnb0ljx8gngzk19jlmbjyvac4hw6-glibc-2.38-44/lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007b62ef114000)
libc.so.6 => /nix/store/ksk3rnb0ljx8gngzk19jlmbjyvac4hw6-glibc-2.38-44/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007b62eef2b000)
/nix/store/ksk3rnb0ljx8gngzk19jlmbjyvac4hw6-glibc-2.38-44/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007b62ef222000)

Right, so the NixOS link-loader is missing a C++ library. Here are two ways of solving this:

1. Install the plugin through a Nix derivation which includes the c++ library in the binary wrapper (i.e. through the excellent nix-vscode-extensions library). This was not working for me either (back to the Module not found issue)
2. Utilize nix-ld link-loader which allows me to run dynamic libraries like a regular linux distro

I already had nix-ld-rs set up on my system. I used the maintainers dotfiles for reference: https://github.com/Mic92/dotfiles/blob/main/nixos/modules/nix-ld.nix. nix-ld will however not automatically fix the parcel binary for us, because it is run from node nix-ld won't be used. I am still exploring the best way to scope vscode extensions to using the NIX_LD_LIBRARY_PATH without setting the it for subprocesses, like shells within VSCode. Right now, I am doing this:

1. Run VSCode with LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$NIX_LD_LIBRARY_PATH code-insiders ...`
2. Unset the LD_LIBRARY_PATH when a shell open. I use direnv to automatically load development environments, so it's as easy as adding unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH into the .envrc file

The permanent solution should probably be to contribute to https://github.com/nix-community/nix-vscode-extensions and make sure that the libstdc++.so.6 library is bundled with VSCode whenever the NX Console extension is installed.

Feel free to provide feedback or discuss other solutions to the issue below.

[MaxKless]

Thanks so much for the in-depth research & write-up. This is surely going to help a lot of people!

[clemenscodes]

Thanks a bunch! Using the nix-ld approach, I ended up creating a home-manager desktop entry which handles this for me (on wayland).

{...}: {
  xdg = {
    desktopEntries = {
      codium = {
        name = "VSCodium";
        type = "Application";
        categories = ["Utility" "TextEditor" "Development" "IDE"];
        comment = "Code Editing. Redefined.";
        exec = ''sh -c "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=\\$NIX_LD_LIBRARY_PATH codium --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations"'';
        genericName = "Text Editor";
        icon = "vscodium";
        mimeType = ["x-scheme-handler/vscode"];
        noDisplay = false;
        startupNotify = true;
        terminal = false;
      };
    };
  };
}

[dsod]

That is great! Glad it helped.

Keep in mind that any sub-process, i.e. a terminal inside VSCode will have the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable set in this setup. It can mess up other CLI tools / binaries installed in your NixOS installation. That is why I am unsetting it again for terminals spawned inside vscode.

[clemenscodes]

Yeah, for that I'll also use direnv, either with a shellHook or directly in the .envrc, but this is a more project based solution and not every project will need. Working with Tauri will definitely need it.