VSCode devcontainers are a great way to keep development environments consistent across machines.
Here are a few customizations I made to my default devcontainer to make it feel a bit more like home:
I walk through configuring these features below. This devcontainer configuration is available on my public repo. Feel free clone the repo and try it out in VSCode.
When VSCode opens the project, it will prompt to reopen the project in a devcontainer. If this prompt doesn't appear then open the command palette and search for "Dev Containers: Reopen in Container".
The first time it builds will take a little while. In the meantime Let's look at the configurations to see the customizations.
The .devcontainer folder contains the configuration files for the devcontainer.
.devcontainer
├── Dockerfile
├── devcontainer.json
└── post_create.sh
Python and Vim are installed in the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file using available features.
...
"features": {
"ghcr.io/devcontainers-contrib/features/curl-apt-get:1": {},
"ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/git:1": {},
"ghcr.io/guiyomh/features/vim:0": {},
"ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/python:1": {
"version": "3.11"
},
"ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/docker-outside-of-docker:1": {}
},
...
To install dotfiles during set-up the VSCode settings.json must be configured.
My settings.json file looks like this:
// settings.json
...
"dotfiles.repository": "gavinest/dotfiles",
"dotfiles.targetPath": "~/dotfiles",
"dotfiles.installCommand": "install.sh",
...
The install.sh script in my dotfiles repo is used by VSCode to set up the dotfiles. I take this opporunity to configure Zsh and Oh My Zsh and Vim plugins as well.
Finally, the .devcontainer/post_create.sh script runs after the devcontainer is created. This is a good place to install any additional tools or configurations. I use it to install the project Python dependencies with Poetry so my virtual environment is good to go once I enter the container. I also have some commands here to persist the .zsh_history. That was the subject of another post.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euxo pipefail
mkdir -p /commandhistory
touch /commandhistory/.zsh_history
chown -R ${USER} /commandhistory
echo "autoload -Uz add-zsh-hook; append_history() { fc -W }; add-zsh-hook precmd append_history; export HISTFILE=/commandhistory/.zsh_history" >> /home/${USER}/.zshrc
echo "PATH=\".venv/bin:${PATH}\"" >> /home/${USER}/.zshrc
pip install --upgrade pip \
&& pip install poetry \
&& poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true \
&& poetry config cache-dir ./ \
&& poetry install --with=dev --no-root