Workspace management in the Cloud Shell Editor

The Cloud Shell Editor lets you manage your projects as workspaces. A workspace usually represents the root folder of your project and includes your project-specific configuration files. A Home workspace (based on your Home directory) is created for you automatically.

With workspaces, you can specify persistent settings, run and debug configurations, and UI states (like open files) for all the folders in your workspace.

This page explains how to create, open, save, and close a workspace, and configure Cloud Shell Editor and workspace settings.

Create a new workspace

To create a new workspace:

  1. Using the Cloud Shell terminal, create a new directory to use as your workspace:
    • Use mkdir to manually create a new directory
    • Use git clone to copy in an existing repository
  2. After your directory is ready, open it as a new workspace by clicking File > Open Workspace.

Open a workspace

You can open a workspace in one of the following ways:

  • Click File > Open Folder.

  • If no workspaces are open, click the Open Folder button in the Cloud Shell Editor Explorer view.

    Open Workspace button accessible in Explorer when no workspaces are open

  • Select a recently opened workspace from the Recent section in the Welcome to Cloud Shell window.

    Alternatively, click File > Open Recent Workspace.

    Recently opened workspaces like hello-world-1 and appengine-guestbook-python available under Recent. Clicking their linked names opens the workspace in the Explorer

Open a Home workspace

To operate using a Home workspace, open your Home directory as your workspace by clicking File > Open Folder and then choose your Home directory.

Save a workspace

After you've added project folders to your workspace and configured it, you can save your workspace under a new name by clicking File > Save Workspace As.

Close a workspace

To close your workspace, click File > Close Folder and then click OK when prompted.

Delete a workspace

To delete the folder, run the following command:

rm -rf FOLDER_NAME

Configure settings

The Cloud Shell Editor's behavior and interface are easily configured with the Settings menu. You can define your preferences for debugging configurations, YAML editing support, and Command Palette history limits, among a variety of settings using this Settings editor. Settings are accessible through the Settings Gear Settings Gear icon, in the bottom left corner of the editor.

There are three scopes for settings:

  • User settings: Globally-applicable settings, applied to all your instances of the Cloud Shell Editor. This configuration is stored in the browser.
  • Remote settings: Globally-applicable settings, applied to all your instances of the Cloud Shell Editor. These settings are stored in your Cloud Shell home directory under $HOME/.codeoss/data/Machine/settings.json.