Your Polarion Dev Toolkit: VS Code, GitHub Copilot & Docker — Zero to Ready

Table of Contents

• Before You Start: Prerequisites
• Part 1: Visual Studio Code
  • Install
  • Essential Extensions
    • AI & Workflow
    • Java & Polarion Stack
    • Formatting & Containers
    • Optional — Install When You Need Them
  • Recommended Settings
  • Maven & settings.xml
  • Sign in to GitHub Copilot
• Part 2: Docker for Polarion Development
  • Why Docker, not a local Polarion install?
  • What to install
  • The Polarion Docker Repository
  • Getting your Polarion container running
  • Controlling Polarion from inside VS Code
  • Attaching the Debugger
  • Everyday commands
  • If you've never used Docker before
• Checklist before the first session

Before You Start: Prerequisites

This caught us in the first real session — and it'll catch you too if you skip it.

Java, Maven, and SVN are not pre-installed on most developer machines, regardless of OS. They're the entire foundation of the stack. Without them, extensions will silently fail, builds won't run, and SVN source control won't show up at all. The error messages aren't always obvious — which is exactly why this took longer to debug than it should have.

Verify these exist on your machine before touching anything else:

java -version
mvn -version
svn --version

All three should respond. If any of them don't, install the missing ones first:

• macOS: brew install openjdk maven svn (after openjdk, run the symlink command Homebrew prints — otherwise java -version still returns nothing)
• Windows: Adoptium for Java, maven.apache.org for Maven, TortoiseSVN for SVN command-line. After installing Java and Maven, verify they're on your PATH. Open a new PowerShell window and run the version commands above. If they're not found, add the bin directories to your user PATH via System Settings → Environment Variables.
• Linux: sudo apt install openjdk-21-jdk maven subversion (or equivalent for your distro)