Thirteen years ago, I attained dual undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and math, then promptly started full-time at InterSystems using neither. One of my most memorable and stomach-churning academic experiences was in Stats II. On an exam, I was solving a moderately difficult confidence interval problem. I was running out of time, so (being an engineer) I wrote out the definite integral on the exam paper, punched it into my graphing calculator, wrote an arrow with “calculator” over it, then wrote the result.

It's been a while since I've posted about Embedded Git on the Developer Community, and I'd like to provide an update on the massive amount of work we've done this year and where we're going next.

Context

If you're building solutions on IRIS and want to use Git, that's great! Just use VSCode with a local git repo and push your changes out to the server - it's that easy.

But what if:

I know that people who are completely new to VS Code, Git, Docker, FHIR, and other tools can sometimes struggle with setting up the environment. So I decided to write an article that walks through the entire setup process step by step to make it easier to get started.

I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a comment at the end - let me know if the instructions were clear, if anything was missing, or if there’s anything else you'd find helpful.

The setup includes:

✅ VS Code – Code editor
✅ Git – Version control system
✅ Docker – Runs an instance of IRIS for Health Community
✅ VS Code REST Client Extension – For running FHIR API queries
✅ Python – For writing FHIR-based scripts
✅ Jupyter Notebooks – For AI and FHIR assignments

Before you begin: Ensure you have administrator privileges on your system.

In addition to reading the guide, you can also follow the steps in the videos:

For Windows

https://www.youtube.com/embed/IyvuHbxCwCY
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Table of Contents

1. Purpose of the article
2. What containers are and why they make sense with IRIS
    2.1 Containers and images in a nutshell
    2.2 Why containers are useful for developers
    2.3 Why IRIS works well with Docker
3. Prerequisites
4. Installing the InterSystems IRIS image
    4.1 Using Docker Hub
    4.2 Pulling the image
5. Running the InterSystems IRIS image
    5.1 Starting an IRIS container
    5.2 Checking container status
    5.3 Executing code in the container terminal
    5.4 Accessing the IRIS Management Portal
    5.5 Connecting the container to VS Code
    5.6 Stopping or removing the container
    5.7 Setting a specific password with a bind mount
    5.8 Using durable %SYS volumes
     5.8.1 What gets stored with durable %SYS
     5.8.2 How to enable durable %SYS
6. Using Docker Compose
    6.1 Docker Compose example
    6.2 Running Docker Compose
7. Using a Dockerfile to run custom source code
    7.1 Dockerfile example
    7.2 Docker Compose example
    7.3 Understanding layers, image tagging and build vs. run time
    7.4 Source code and init script
    7.5 Building the image with Dockerfile
    7.6 Running instructions in the containerized IRIS terminal
8. Conclusion and what’s next

So being forced to use VSCode out of the box for a new Community install I've hit a small problem, documentation hasn't helped and its a simple problem.

How do I enable auto complete and the property viewer in creating a new .MAC?

So I've created "test.mac" and 'assume' can't remember the method name to open a file (for example), typing

"s f=##class(%Library.File). " in Studio would bring up the methods of %Library.File so I could click the appropriate one, VSCode does not do this (and also didn't show the classes under %Library).

Hello my Friends,

I have a question, I have a data like this

And I want to create a display like this, which I can put a status column beside the Item Column

The status become new, if there's no previous item, and if there's a same item after the first one, the status become Old

Does anyone could help me ?

Just curious what the process is for debugging either a .py file that is uploaded to a specific namespace/location or a python classmethod defined in a .cls file.

My method can be run via the "Debug" breadcrumb but it doesnt hit breakpoints it just runs without a debugger. Also objectscript methods debug correctly

To VSCode experts - see the screenshot. When right-click on a method with intentions to proceed to the source code:

I am always confused about what to choose: declaration or definition. What is the difference?

Hello everybody,

I would like to export project contents using Visual Studio Code, as well as I do with InterSystems Studio.

However, while attempting the export through the InterSystems extension I get the following error:

- There are no folders in the current workspace that code can be exported to.

These are the step to reproduce my error:

Hello All,

I'm new to InterSystems, just wanted to check if we can configure the Visual Studio code to use it as Studio for Intersystems development. I tried following the instructions in few posts but nothing worked. Please guide me to setup this

I have installed three plugins on VS Code: Intersystems Language Server: v2.3.6, Intersystems ObjectScript: v2.10.5, and Intersystems Server Manager: v3.6.2. I connected to the Caché database and connected a workspace to the InterSystems server. Then I edited the code locally on my client machine.

Windows 10/Windows Server 2016:

I am currently monitoring our license use with a new rest-service I am implementing when I noticed my licenses on my instance being consumed and never released by Visual Studio Code.

Visual Studio Code releases new updates every month with new features and bug fixes, and the February 2025 release is now available.

There have been enhancements to GitHub Copilot with predictive editing, autonomous task completion, smarter code search, improved terminal and notebook support, and UI and workflow refinements.

Hi,

Just thought I'd share quite a handy hook that has helped me out when developing on Health Connect Cloud with VS Code and GitBash. When developing on Health Connect Cloud, if changes are made directly on the server such as routing rules or component deployments, they aren't automatically included in source control, therefore you must export from the server into your local files and push to your remote repo. I'm sure there are easier methods to deal with that which I'm in the process of testing, but as a quick solution I thought it would be handy have a pre-commit hook which triggers a reminder in GitBash - see below.