Live Preview doesn't work out of the box

[iaindillingham]

@rose-higgins reports that VS Code's Live Preview extension doesn't work out of the box.¹

I think we pre-install this extension. If so, then we should investigate whether we can make it work. If we can't make it work, then we should add an entry to "How to troubleshoot common issues in GitHub Codespaces".

Footnotes

1. https://bennettoxford.slack.com/archives/C069SADHP1Q/p1714470418111759 ↩

[StevenMaude]

A few notes from a quick look at this.

• We don't install the extension by default.
• This is the upstream issue for improving how Live Preview works in Codespaces: Improve experience when using Codespaces microsoft/vscode-livepreview#111 — it's been open a long time.
• There are other HTML/Markdown Preview extensions that do work out of the box; one example for reference as opposed to a suggestion to use it. However, that's a third-party extension. I don't know if we have a policy that says we should only use extensions from approved vendors (all our current default installed extensions are by Microsoft).
  • That said, I'm not sure there's any way we can restrict the extensions that a user installs.

If we want to install the Live Server extension by default, we should definitely document it. If it's a common use case, we may want to add a note as mentioned above.

[iaindillingham]

Thanks for looking into this, @StevenMaude. I think the solution is to document the issue with the extension in the troubleshooting section, linking to (or paraphrasing) the Stack Overflow answer Jon linked to in Slack.