GLMakie on vscode remote backend

General Usage
1

Does anybody know if it’s possible to use GLMakie with vscode remote backend? CairoMaike works.

When I try, I get this:

Failed to precompile GLMakie [e9467ef8-e4e7-5192-8a1a-b1aee30e663a] to "/home/user/.julia/compiled/v1.12/GLMakie/jl_6wz446".
┌ Warning:     OpenGL/GLFW wasn't loaded correctly or couldn't be initialized.
│     This likely means, you're on a headless server without having OpenGL support setup correctly.
│     Have a look at the troubleshooting section in the readme:
│     https://github.com/MakieOrg/Makie.jl/tree/master/GLMakie#troubleshooting-opengl.
└ @ GLMakie ~/.julia/packages/GLMakie/vdrwE/src/gl_backend.jl:4
ERROR: LoadError: InitError: Exception[GLFW.GLFWError(65550, "X11: The DISPLAY environment variable is missing"), ErrorException("glfwInit failed")]
2

If you want to do rendering on the remote machine, you’d need this setup for software rendering:

But if you want to do rendering on your local machine then I think you might be able to do some kind of X forwarding? Not sure if that can be done through VSCode. WGLMakie is also an option there.

3

So right now when I try to install GLMakie on remote via vscode on local, I get that error I copy pasted. Are you saying that if I install those things on remove, this install should succeed?

4

If you install:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y xorg-dev mesa-utils xvfb libgl1 freeglut3-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libxext-dev xsettingsd x11-xserver-utils

and start Julia with:

DISPLAY=:0 xvfb-run -s '-screen 0 1024x768x24' julia --project

installation will succeed. But that is only half of the story, you also want to see the plots. You could try X11 forwarding. Not sure how to do that.

5

You could also try using WGLMakie, which should work in the plotpane.
Best forward 9384, then you shouldn’t need to do anything else.