Configure VisualStudio Code for MediaWiki development

hosting
1

When using Visual Studio Code for development, one of it’s greatest strengths is the ability to use remote development environments using SSH. However, in order to have the IDE monitor the entire MediaWiki workspace for symbols and definitions, we need to significantly increase the number of ‘file watches’ allowed to the user.

See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux#_visual-studio-code-is-unable-to-watch-for-file-changes-in-this-large-workspace-error-enospc

E.g.
There are nearly 120,000 files in a MediaWiki folder

# find /opt/htdocs/wiki/mediawiki -type f |wc
 112550  112627 8161855

So set that in /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

# Increase the number of 'watches' to enable VisualStudio to monitor large workspaces
# Default is 8192
# Each consumes around 1080 bytes so 30,000 = 32MB
fs.inotify.max_user_watches=120000

And then load the new value with sudo sysctl -p