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Use Arcade in Visual Studio Code

In this guide, you’ll learn how to connect Visual Studio Code to an Arcade Gateway.

To use Arcade’s hosted gateway, install the Arcade agent plugin. This guide connects your client to a gateway you configure.

Production end with their own identities? If your end users already sign in to Entra ID, Okta, Auth0, Clerk, or another OIDC provider, configure a User Source on your gateway. Arcade redirects each end user to your identity provider on sign-in and identifies them by an OIDC subject claim.

Prerequisites

  1. Create an Arcade
  2. Create an Arcade MCP Gateway and select the you want to use

Set up Visual Studio Code

  1. Download and open Visual Studio Code  (version 1.107.0 or higher)
  2. Open the command palette and run : Add Server…
  3. Choose HTTP (HTTP or Server-Sent Events)
  4. Paste the URL of your Gateway
  5. Enter a server ID, such as mcp-arcade
  6. For a personal setup, select Global, then Copilot Global when that option appears. To share the server with a , choose the workspace destination instead

Visual Studio Code writes the server to mcp.json.

Start the MCP Server in Visual Studio Code

  1. Run : List Servers, select the server, and choose Start. You can also start it from the mcp.json editor, or from Chat: Open Customizations → .
  2. Visual Studio Code will prompt you to authenticate, and you may see a prompt about opening an external site: cloud.arcade.dev. You can safely allow both of these.
  3. If you see an Arcade login screen, authenticate with your Arcade .
  4. You should see an Arcade consent screen asking you to authorize Visual Studio Code to access your Arcade . Click “Allow” to continue.
  5. You should then see a webpage from Visual Studio Code saying the sign in was successful. You may see a prompt from your browser to open a link in Visual Studio Code. You can safely allow this.

Your Server should now be running and you can use it in Visual Studio Code.

Try it out

  1. Open your IDE’s chat pane.
  2. Make sure you are in mode
  3. Ask the to use a !

Note: if you are using the Arcade Header auth mode for your Gateway, you will manually need to add the headers property in your mcp.json file:

JSON
{
  "servers": {
    "mcp-arcade": {
      "url": "https://api.arcade.dev/mcp/<YOUR-GATEWAY-SLUG>",
      "type": "http",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer {arcade_api_key}",
        "Arcade-User-ID": "{arcade_user_id}"
      }
    }
  }
}

You will not see the authentication prompts when you start the Server in Visual Studio Code because the config passes the directly.

Last updated on
Claude CodeMicrosoft Copilot Studio