group - Allows you to specify whether the command belongs to the build or test group.

command - The actual command you want to execute.

type - The type of the task, in our first task this was NPM, for a custom task this can be either shell or process.

label - The label used for the task in the VS Code interface.

For a full list of all possible properties, you can read the official documentation. Let’s go through the properties we just used and what they mean. I did this for my start script and it generated the following output for me.

Choose the NPM script you want to make a task for.

Select the configure task option - Tasks: Configure Task.

Open the command palette - CTRL / CMD + Shift + P.

In this case, I used the automatically detected NPM script as a template. VS Code already recognizes NPM scripts for example.

You can create a task manually, or you can make a task based on an existing automatically detected script. This way I can spare myself some of that self-created annoyance. In this article, I want to make a task that starts up my asset watcher when I open VS Code. (Don’t judge me, I usually wake up at 6 AM 😅) It isn’t until I made a few CSS or JS changes that I notice that nothing is happening. What I often seem to forget is to start up Webpack to watch and build my assets.

Use CaseĮvery morning when I stumble out of bed I grab a cup of coffee, write a good morning message to my team on Slack and fire up VS Code and open my local dev URL in the browser. This is where Visual Studio Code’s task feature comes into play. Sometimes it might be useful if you could run these commands straight from your editor, perhaps even automate when they should run. Usually, these commands are run from the command line giving developers quick access to a series of steps that need to be taken. Examples of these are NPM scripts, Gulp, Make, ESLint, Webpack, and Prettier. There are many tools available to automate developer tasks such as listing, building, packaging, testing, and deploying software systems.

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