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Tools

Operating system

All Bitwarden developers are issued with a MacBook or Windows laptop. The tooling recommendations and instructions in this documentation assume that you’re using one of these operating systems, noting where a tool may apply to only one of them.

This may require some adaptation if you’re using a different operating system.

Recommended tools

The following tools are strongly recommended as part of the "standard" developer setup. We recommend that any new Bitwarden developer install all of them as part of setting up their local development environment.

IDEs

Tool	How we use it
JetBrains Rider	Fully featured IDE for C#, .NET & more. Bitwarden developers should contact IT for a license.
Visual Studio	Used for C# development on Windows.
Visual Studio Code	Used for all Typescript projects. Suboptimal for C#. Be sure to install extensions.
Xcode	Required for iOS Mobile development and Safari web extension.

Local environment

Tool	How we use it
.NET SDK	Required for server and other back-end development environments.
Docker	Required for server development only. Bitwarden developers should contact IT for a license for Docker Desktop.
Git	Commit signing is strongly recommended.
Homebrew	Package manager for macOS.
Iterm2	A better terminal emulator (available via Homebrew).
NodeJS	Check the engines in package.json for the current version. We recommend using a node version manager.
npm	Check the engines in package.json for the current version. It is included with NodeJS.
PowerShell	Available via Homebrew on macOS: brew install powershell.
Rust	We stay on the latest stable version - preferably installed via rustup.
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.

Mobile-specific tooling

Tool	How we use it
adb	For interacting with Android sims.
Android Studio	Nice for setting up and running Android Simulators.
Apple Icons Generator Gist	Script to generate Apple icons from an image.

Databases

Tool	How we use it
Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer	For connecting to or working with local Azure table storage and queues.
MSSQL VSCode Extension	For working with your local SQL Server.
MySQLWorkbench	Useful for fiddling with MySQL db.
PgAdmin4	Useful for fiddling with PostgreSQL db.
SQLiteStudio	Useful for fiddling with SQLite db.

Visual Studio Code extensions

There are some VS Code extensions that are very helpful in our codebase. A list of highly recommended ones include the following:

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

Optional tools

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

Tool	How we use it
Parallels	For running Windows or Linux VMs on macOS machines.
Sourcetree	Git GUI. For the Git hooks to behave correctly on macOS when using nvm, please follow these instructions.