Highlights

• The Upbound VSCode plugin for Crossplane makes it easier than ever to build Crossplane Providers and Configurations.
• Key features include dependency validation, schema validation, and auto-complete (coming soon).
• The plugin is currently in alpha status and is free and open source. It works best with Universal Crossplane, Upbound’s downstream Crossplane distribution.

Today we’re excited to share the alpha version of Upbound’s VSCode plugin for Crossplane. With this free tool, platform teams can more easily compose infrastructure resources and author Crossplane providers for their platforms using one of the most popular code editors. The plugin is available for free on the VSCode Marketplace.

Building Platforms more Easily

Our customers have given us incredible feedback on the benefits of building their platforms around control planes. They found that once they deployed our downstream Crossplane distribution, Universal Crossplane (UXP), it was easier than ever to give developers access to their platform and manage all of the infrastructure they deployed with it.

However, a top complaint was how difficult it was to compose infrastructure resources or author a new provider. Upbound offers professional services which help customers compose infrastructure, and the provider ecosystem around Crossplane is growing each and every day, but a key benefit of building a platform using a control plane is being able to quickly add new resources and abstractions to it yourself.

We built this VSCode plugin to help the entire Crossplane community more easily author providers and compose infrastructure abstractions. All that’s required is a free download of the Upbound CLI, up, which now comes with the language server we use to power this plugin.

Key Features

Platform teams using this plugin will find it easier to compose infrastructure without memorizing the API schema of the Managed Resources they’re using.

• Schema Validation: Platform teams using the plugin will see what fields are required and what type they accept when composing resources, reducing human error and shortening the development cycle.
• Dependency Validation and Resolution: Provider dependencies will be resolved and downloaded when users run the `up xpkg dep` command.
• Boilerplate Generation: As part of this release, we also shipped new commands in the Upbound CLI. Platform teams can more easily build Providers and Configurations with the `up xpkg init` command which takes users through a wizard and generates a lot of boilerplate code.
• Autocomplete (coming soon): This is an alpha release, so not all features and functionality are available today. We’re hoping to add autocomplete to the plugin within the first half of this year.

Open Source and Contributing

The plugin, as well as the language server it uses, is open source and free to use. Community members looking to contribute or who want to submit a bug/feature request can do so on the project’s GitHub page.