Common Error Cases

Some errors that happen in Visual Studio Code can be worked around or resolved by you. This topic describes several of the most common error conditions, and what you can do to resolve them.

If these steps don't help you, you probably hit a bug. You can check our reported issues list to see if others have had the same issue.

20002

Error: Cannot find '/usr/bin/gnome-terminal' for launching your Node.js program

On Linux the VS Code Node.js debugger requires the gnome-terminal for launching the Node.js program. If gnome-terminal is not installed, the VS Code debugger cannot launch your program for debugging.

There are two options for solving this problem:

  • Install the gnome-terminal by running the command sudo apt-get install gnome-terminal (or the equivalent of your Linux distribution)
  • Manually launch your program in debug mode by passing a --debug or --debug-brk option to Node.js and then attach the VS Code debugger to port 5858 on 'localhost'.

20003

Error: Attribute 'program' is not absolute; consider adding '${workspaceRoot}/' as a prefix to make it absolute.

Before VS Code release 0.10.11, it was possible to use relative paths in launch configurations. VS Code would silently convert them to absolute paths.

There were two problems with this:

  • VS Code would only fix paths for some well-known attributes like program, cwd, or outDir. Relative paths passed as an argument or set as an environment variable would not be fixed and this behavior was not transparent.
  • VS Code would only fix paths in the launch.json configuration file. It would not touch paths in tasks.json and this inconsistency was difficult to understand.

Starting with release 0.10.11, VS Code no longer modifies launch configuration paths. If you are using relative paths in your launch configurations, you'll need to fix them by prefixing the relative path with ${workspaceRoot}/.