Visual studio code terminal, how to run a command with administrator rights?

Question

Option 1 - Easier & Persistent

Running Visual Studio Code as Administrator should do the trick.

If you're on Windows you can:

1. Right click the shortcut or app/exe
2. Go to properties
3. Compatibility tab
4. Check "Run this program as an administrator"

There is a caveat to it though

Make sure you have all other instances of VS Code closed and then try to run as Administrator. The electron framework likes to stall processes when closing them so it's best to check your task manager and kill the remaining processes.

Related Changes in Codebase

• https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/293070-visual-studio-code/suggestions/8915236-visual-code-w-terminal-integrated-and-super-admin
• https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/7407

Option 2 - More like Sudo

If for some weird reason this is not running your commands as an Administrator you can try the runas command. Microsoft: runas command

Examples

• runas /user:Administrator myCommand
• runas "/user:First Last" "my command"

Notes

• Just don't forget to put double quotes around anything that has a space in it.
• Also it's quite possible that you have never set the password on the Administrator account, as it will ask you for the password when trying to run the command. You can always use an account without the username of Administrator if it has administrator access rights/permissions.

Step 1: Restart VS Code as an adminstrator

(click the windows key, search for "Visual Studio Code", right click, and you'll see the administrator option)

Step 2: In your VS code powershell terminal run Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Running as admin didn't help me. (also got errors with syscall: rename)

Turns out this error can also occur if files are locked by Windows.

This can occur if :

• You are actually running the project
• You have files open in both Visual Studio and VSCode.

Running as admin doesn't get around windows file locking.

I created a new project in VS2017 and then switched to VSCode to try to add more packages. After stopping the project from running and closing VS2017 it was able to complete without error

Disclaimer: I'm not exactly sure if this means running as admin isn't necessary, but try to avoid it if possible to avoid the possibility of some rogue package doing stuff it isn't meant to.

Here's what I get.

I'm using Visual Studio Code and its Terminal to execute the 'npm' commands.

Visual Studio Code (not as administrator)
PS g:\labs\myproject> npm install bootstrap@3

Results in scandir and/or permission errors.

Visual Studio Code (as Administrator)
Run this command after I've run something like 'ng serve'

PS g:\labs\myproject> npm install bootstrap@3

Results in scandir and/or permission errors.

Visual Studio Code (as Administrator - closing and opening the IDE)
If I have already executed other commands that would impact node modules I decided to try closing Visual Studio Code first, opening it up as Administrator then running the command:

PS g:\labs\myproject> npm install bootstrap@3

Result I get then is: + [email protected]
added 115 packages and updated 1 package in 24.685s

This is not a permanent solution since I don't want to continue closing down VS Code every time I want to execute an npm command, but it did resolve the issue to a point.