VSCode and Ionic/Cordova Platform File Locking

If your running into file locking, like in the platform/android/assets/www folder, trying to use the Ionic or Cordova CLI tools with VSCode you need to exclude those folders from your VSCode’s explorer. The benefit here is also they will disappear from your search results from VSCode as well.

The error you might be receiving might look like:

rm: could not remove directory (code ENOTEMPTY): pathto\platforms\android\assets\www/js/libs

In Windows select File->Preferences->Workspace Settings.

A split screen editor will appear, edit the right hand window, it may be almost blank and include the files.exclude object from below.

// Place your settings in this file to overwrite default and user settings.
{
“files.exclude”: {
“**/.git”: true,
“**/.DS_Store”: true,
“**/node_modules”: true,
“node_modules”: true,
“platforms”: true,
“plugins”: true
}
}

Once you save the settings.json file they should disappear from your VSCode explorer, but you may need to restart VSCode to make sure.