In a recent release we broke the extension for a subset of our users; the extension failed to load after auto updating. This is now fixed, however, it could happen again and we wouldn't know till after releasing. These users have a specific environment or setup with their VSCode that caused the following error:
2024-08-29 20:00:39.444 [error] Activating extension mongodb.mongodb-vscode failed due to an error:2024-08-29 20:00:39.444 [error] Error: Cannot find module 'electron'Require stack:- /home/node/.vscode-server/extensions/mongodb.mongodb-vscode-1.8.0/dist/extension.js- /vscode/vscode-server/bin/linux-x64/fee1edb8d6d72a0ddff41e5f71a671c23ed924b9/out/bootstrap-fork.js at Module._resolveFilename (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1145:15) at Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:986:27) at y._load (/vscode/vscode-server/bin/linux-x64/fee1edb8d6d72a0ddff41e5f71a671c23ed924b9/out/vs/workbench/api/node/extensionHostProcess.js:177:6051)
Reported on GitHub issue: https://github.com/mongodb-js/vscode/issues/798 

Fixed in https://github.com/mongodb-js/vscode/pull/799 

Slack thread on the issue: https://mongodb.slack.com/archives/GTTUKDWRH/p1724851113481789 

The fix was updating our webpack config that was externalizing electron and also aliasing it. We removed the external declaration. 

This ticket involves understanding why this errors happens in certain environments, and creating a test to ensure a similar issue doesn't happen in the future. Maybe this is only in remote VSCode usage or usage of VSCode with Windows subsystem for linux.