Tools

Operating system assumptions

The tooling recommendations and instructions in this documentation assume that you’re using macOS. This may require some adaptation if you’re using a different operating system.

The following tools make up the standard Bitwarden developer setup and should be installed as part of your local development environment.

IDEs

• Visual Studio Code - used for all Typescript projects. Suboptimal for C#. Be sure to install extensions
• JetBrains Rider - fully featured IDE for C#, .NET & more. Bitwarden developers should contact IT for a license
• Xcode - required for iOS Mobile development and Safari web extension

Local environment

• Homebrew - package manager for macOS
• Iterm2 (available via Homebrew) - a better terminal emulator
• Various browsers - It’s nice to have a slew of browsers ready to test the extension in a host of scenarios. You can also use multiple browsers to have different browser extension version installed to compare them.
• Docker - required for server development only
• .NET SDK - required for server and other backend development environments
• PowerShell (available via Homebrew: brew install powershell)
• NodeJS v22 (preferably using a node version manager)
• NPM v10 (included with Node)
• Rust latest stable version - (preferably installed via rustup)
• Git
  • Commit signing is strongly recommended

Mobile

• Android Studio - Nice for setting up and running Android Simulators
• adb - for interacting with Android sims
• Apple Icons Generator Gist - Script to generate Apple icons from an image

Databases

• MSSQL VSCode Extension for working with your local SQL Server
• PgAdmin4 - Useful for fiddling with PostgreSQL db
• MySQLWorkbench - Useful for fiddling with MySQL db
• SQLiteStudio - Useful for fiddling with SQLite db

Visual Studio Code extensions

There are some vs code extensions that are life-savers in our line of work. A list of highly recommended ones include the following:

• General
  • Back & Forth - Adds forward and back buttons to top right of your editor. Simple, but incredibly useful.
  • Code Spell Checker - can be annoying, but has saved me lots of tmes form writting oragnizations.
  • LiveShare - For pair programming
• C#
  • C# - Omnisharp integrations
  • .NET Core Test Explorer - Test explorer for .NET tests
  • .NET Core User Secrets - Edit secrets files by right clicking on a .proj and selecting edit user -secrets
• Git
  • Git Graph - fantastic git visualization tool
  • Git History - More Git history
  • Git Lens - Even more Git options
• Typescript / Angular
  • Angular Language Service - Understands Angular templates
  • Jest - Jest test runner
  • Prettier - integrate with prettier code formatting
  • ESLint - Integrations for ESLint
  • Nx Console - UI over the Nx CLI
• Rust
  • rust-analyzer - Great rust language server
  • Even Better TOML - for handling TOML (cargo config)
  • CodeLLDB - for rust debugging
• Databases
  • MySQL Syntax - syntax highlighting for MySQL
  • PostgreSQL - syntax highlighting for PostgreSQL

Optional tools

The following tools may be useful depending on your preferences or what you’re developing.

• Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer - for connecting to or working with local Azure table storage and queues
• Parallels - For running Windows VMs
• Sourcetree - Git GUI. Note: For the git hooks to behave correctly on macOS when using nvm, please follow these instructions.