Open VSX Registry
Open VSX Registry
Role
Mandatory second publish target for every oriz-*-vsc-ext repo.
Open VSX (open-vsx.org) is the Eclipse Foundation's
vendor-neutral, OSS extension registry — the only VS-Code-compatible
marketplace that VSCodium, Cursor, Theia, Gitpod, code-server, and
several other community editors are allowed to consume by default
(the official VS Code Marketplace's terms forbid third-party
clients).
Every VS Code extension dual-publishes to here and to the
VS Code Marketplace, per
decisions/architecture/distribution-and-queues-locked.md.
Free tier
- Free, fully OSS (EPL-2.0).
- Unlimited extensions, unlimited versions.
- No developer fee, no review fee, no per-install fee.
- Publisher namespace approval is a one-time PR to
eclipse/openvsxlisting the publisher's GitHub identity.
Card / subscription required?
NO. Open VSX is a free Eclipse Foundation service; tokens are issued via Eclipse Foundation account login (free, no card).
CI auto-publish
- name: Publish to Open VSX
run: |
pnpm exec ovsx publish dist/extension.vsix \
--pat "$OVSX_PAT"
env:
OVSX_PAT: ${{ secrets.OVSX_PAT }}
ovsx (@vscode/ovsx) is API-compatible with vsce. The same
.vsix artifact submitted to the
VS Code Marketplace is reused.
Credentials in Doppler →
GitHub Secrets.
Who reads from Open VSX
- VSCodium — community FOSS rebuild of VS Code, defaults to Open VSX.
- Cursor — AI-first VS Code fork, defaults to Open VSX (with partial fallthrough to Microsoft's marketplace).
- Theia / Gitpod / code-server — cloud + browser-based IDEs that legally cannot use Microsoft's marketplace.
- Eclipse Che — same constraint.
Skipping Open VSX means our extensions are invisible to every user on those platforms.
Alternatives
- VS Code Marketplace — sibling, required.
- JetBrains Marketplace — different IDE family, walked back as a
publish target. See
decisions/architecture/distribution-and-queues-locked.md.
Swap cost
Low — ovsx publish is one CI step against a well-defined REST API.
Why this is our pick
Reach. Open VSX is the only publish target that captures every non-Microsoft VS Code descendant — and that user base is growing fast (Cursor in particular). The cost of adding it is one CI step and a one-time namespace PR.