TIL: How to resume sessions on virtual machines

Today I learned how to resume sessions on virtual machines while using Visual Studio Code remote.

Visual Studio Code remote is incredible for SSH-ing into remote virtual machines. But sometimes you start off a long-running process in a shell on the remote machine and your connection is interrupted before it can finish; then, when you resume the connection, you’ve lost the progress you made through your code.

But today I learned that you can start off persistent shell processes using a command line tool called screen that comes pre-installed in many Linux distributions (eg Ubuntu).

To use it (assuming it is pre-installed), once you’ve opened the folder you’re working in on the remote via SSH from VS Code, simply type

screen -S YOUR-SHELL-NAME

to initiate a shell with screen name YOUR-SHELL-NAME that will persist.

Once you reconnect to the virtual machine run screen -ls to see existing running shells and screen -r YOUR-SHELL-NAME to reconnect to the running session! Super useful.