Connect to Turbot Pipes from VS Code

VS Code is a source code editor with a rich catalog of extensions, some of which can connect to databases.

Steampipe provides a single interface to all your cloud, code, logs and more. Because it's built on Postgres, Steampipe provides an endpoint that any Postgres-compatible client -- including VS Code database extensions -- can connect to.

You can get the information needed to connect to your Turbot Pipes database instance from the Query tab for your workspace. On the Query tab, click the info button at the top of the query window to show the connection information.

Once Turbot Pipes is successfully connected, you can explore the tables provided by the Steampipe plugins, run queries and build reports.

Similarly, you can also connect VS Code to Steampipe CLI. To do that, run steampipe service start --show-password and use the displayed connection details.

Steampipe service is running:

Database:

  Host(s):            localhost, 127.0.0.1, 192.168.29.204
  Port:               9193
  Database:           steampipe
  User:               steampipe
  Password:           99**_****_**8c
  Connection string:  postgres://steampipe:99**_****_**8c@localhost:9193/steampipe

Getting started

There are a number of VS Code extensions that connect to and query databases. For this example we'll use Chris Koklman's extension.

To create a connection via the command palette, choose PostgreSQL: Add Connection and add the connection details.

Once you're connected to Turbot Pipes, the PostgreSQL Explorer can access the tables available in your workspace. Here we'll use the AWS connection and query the aws_ebs_volume table. VS Code displays the table's schema and previews its data. You can export the data to JSON, XML, or CSV.

Run your first custom query

Use the query editor to write and run custom queries. This query fetches the list of enabled AWS regions.

select
  name,
  opt_in_status
from
  aws_region
where
  opt_in_status = 'not-opted-in';