Tips for debugging why extension not loading

[kurmasz]

Can somebody provide some tips for how to debug why my extension isn't being loaded when running extester?

• My extension runs as expected when launched in debug mode from VSCode
• It runs as expected if I launch VSCode from the command line with --extensionDevelopmentPath
• No errors are generated on either the standard output or in vscode-extension-tester's log file.
• As far as I can tell, my setup is identical to vscode-extension-tester-example.
• I know the extension isn't being loaded, because (a) the commands aren't available, and (b) there are no messages in the log file suggesting that any extensions were loaded.

I'm sure I'm overlooking something simple, but I have no idea how to get useful feedback so I can fix it.

Also, can someone provide more details about what it takes to get vscode-extension-tester to load the extension under test? I see how the example does it, but is such a "fancy" setup always necessary? For example will running npx extest run-tests simply load the extension in the current working directory? (Assuming the cwd contains package.json?). (It appears the answer is "no", but I want to make sure.)