Network Connections in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is built on top ofElectron and benefits from all the networking stack capabilities ofChromium. This also means that VS Code users get much of the networking support available inGoogle Chrome.

Common hostnames

A handful of features within VS Code require network communication to work, such as the auto-update mechanism, querying and installing extensions, and telemetry. For these features to work properly in a proxy environment, you must have the product correctly configured.

If you are behind a firewall that needs to allow specific domains used by VS Code, here's the list of hostnames you should allow communication to go through:

update.code.visualstudio.com - Visual Studio Code download and update server
code.visualstudio.com - Visual Studio Code documentation
go.microsoft.com - Microsoft link forwarding service
marketplace.visualstudio.com - Visual Studio Marketplace
*.gallery.vsassets.io - Visual Studio Marketplace
*.gallerycdn.vsassets.io - Visual Studio Marketplace
rink.hockeyapp.net - Crash reporting service
bingsettingssearch.trafficmanager.net - In-product settings search
vscode.search.windows.net - In-product settings search
raw.githubusercontent.com - GitHub repository raw file access
vsmarketplacebadges.dev - Visual Studio Marketplace badge service
*.vscode-cdn.net - Visual Studio Code CDN
vscode.download.prss.microsoft.com - Visual Studio Code download CDN
download.visualstudio.microsoft.com - Visual Studio download server, provides dependencies for some VS Code extensions (C++, C#)
vscode-sync.trafficmanager.net - Visual Studio Code Settings Sync service
vscode-sync-insiders.trafficmanager.net - Visual Studio Code Settings Sync service (Insiders)
vscode.dev - Used when logging in with GitHub or Microsoft for an extension or Settings Sync
*.vscode-unpkg.net - Used when loading web extensions
default.exp-tas.com - Visual Studio Code Experiment Service, used to provide experimental user experiences

Proxy server support

VS Code has exactly the same proxy server support as Google Chromium. Here's a snippet fromChromium's documentation:

"The Chromium network stack uses the system network settings so that users and administrators can control the network settings of all applications easily. The network settings include: - proxy settings - SSL/TLS settings - certificate revocation check settings - certificate and private key stores"

This means that your proxy settings should be picked up automatically.

Otherwise, you can use the following command-line arguments to control your proxy settings:

# Disable proxy--no-proxy-server# Manual proxy address--proxy-server=<scheme>=<uri>[:<port>][;...] | <uri>[:<port>] |"direct://"# Manual PAC address--proxy-pac-url=<pac-file-url># Disable proxy per host--proxy-bypass-list=(<trailing_domain>|<ip-address>)[:<port>][;...]

To learn more about these command-line arguments, seeChromium Network Settings.

Authenticated proxies

Authenticated proxies should work seamlessly within VS Code with the addition ofPR #22369.

The authentication methods supported are:

Basic
Digest
NTLM
Negotiate

When using VS Code behind an authenticated HTTP proxy, the following authentication popup should appear:

proxy

Note that SOCKS5 proxy authentication support isn't implemented yet; you can follow theissue in Chromium's issue tracker.

SeeChromium HTTP authentication to read more about HTTP proxy authentication within VS Code.

SSL certificates

Often HTTPS proxies rewrite SSL certificates of the incoming requests. Chromium was designed to reject responses which are signed by certificates which it doesn't trust. If you hit any SSL trust issues, there are a few options available for you:

Since Chromium uses the OS's certificate trust infrastructure, the preferred option is to add your proxy's certificate to your OS's trust chain. See theChromium Root Certificate Policy documentation to learn more.
If your proxy runs inlocalhost, you can always try the--allow-insecure-localhost command-line flag.
If all else fails, you can tell VS Code to ignore all certificate errors using the--ignore-certificate-errors command-line flag.Warning: This isdangerous andnot recommended, since it opens the door to security issues.

Legacy proxy server support

Extensions don't benefit yet from the same proxy support that VS Code supports. You can follow this issue's development inGitHub.

Similarly to extensions, a few other VS Code features don't yet fully support proxy networking, namely the CLI interface. The CLI interface is what you get when runningcode --install-extension vscodevim.vim from a command prompt or terminal. You can follow this issue's development inGitHub.

Due to both of these constraints, thehttp.proxy,http.proxyStrictSSL andhttp.proxyAuthorization variables are still part of VS Code's settings, yet they are only respected in these two scenarios.

Troubleshooting

Here are some helpful links that might help you troubleshoot networking issues in VS Code:

07/09/2025