Dev Containers: Going further
Dev Containers allow developers to share a common working environment, ensuring that the runtime and all dependencies versions are consistent for all developers.
Dev containers also allow us to:
- Leverage existing tools to enhance the Dev Containers with more features,
- Provide custom tools (such as scripts) for other developers.
Existing tools
In the development phase, you will most probably need to use tools not installed by default in your Dev Container. For instance, if your project's target is to be deployed on Azure, you will need Azure-cli and maybe Terraform for resources and application deployment. You can find such Dev Containers in the VS Code dev container gallery repo.
Some other tools may be:
Linting files that are not the source code can ensure a common format with common rules for each developer. These checks should be also run in a Continuous Integration Pipeline, but it is a good practice to run them prior opening a Pull Request.
Limitation of custom tools
If you decide to include Azure-cli in your Dev Container, developers will be able to run commands against their tenant. However, to make the developers' lives easier, we could go further by letting them prefill their connection information, such as the tenant ID and the subscription ID in a secure and persistent way (do not forget that your Dev Container, being a Docker container, might get deleted, or the image could be rebuilt, hence, all customization inside will be lost).
One way to achieve this is to leverage environment variables, with untracked .env file part of the solution being injected in the Dev Container.
Consider the following files structure:
My Application # main repo directory
└───.devcontainer
| ├───Dockerfile
| ├───devcontainer.json
└───config
| ├───.env
| ├───.env-sample
The file config/.env-sample is a tracked file where anyone can find environment variables to set (with no values, obviously):
Then, each developer who clones the repository can create the file config/.env and fills it in with the appropriate values.
In order now to inject the .env file into the container, you can update the file devcontainer.json with the following:
As soon as the Dev Container is started, these environment variables are sent to the container.
Another approach would be to use Docker Compose, a little bit more complex, and probably too much for just environment variables. Using Docker Compose can unlock other settings such as custom dns, ports forwarding or multiple containers.
To achieve this, you need to add a file .devcontainer/docker-compose.yml with the following:
version: '3'
services:
my-workspace:
env_file: ../config/.env
build:
context: .
dockerfile: Dockerfile
command: sleep infinity
To use the docker-compose.yml file instead of Dockerfile, we need to adjust devcontainer.json with:
{
"name": "My Application",
"dockerComposeFile": ["docker-compose.yml"],
"service": "my-workspace"
...
}
This approach can be applied for many other tools by preparing what would be required. The idea is to simplify developers' lives and new developers joining the project.
Custom tools
While working on a project, any developer might end up writing a script to automate a task. This script can be in bash, python or whatever scripting language they are comfortable with.
Let's say you want to ensure that all markdown files written are validated against specific rules you have set up. As we have seen above, you can include the tool markdownlint in your Dev Container . Having the tool installed does not mean developer will know how to use it!
Consider the following solution structure:
My Application # main repo directory
└───.devcontainer
| ├───Dockerfile
| ├───docker-compose.yml
| ├───devcontainer.json
└───scripts
| ├───check-markdown.sh
└───.markdownlint.json
The file .devcontainer/Dockerfile installs markdownlint
...
RUN apt-get update \
&& export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
&& apt-get install -y nodejs npm
# Add NodeJS tools
RUN npm install -g markdownlint-cli
...
The file .markdownlint.json contains the rules you want to validate in your markdown files (please refer to the markdownlint site for details).
And finally, the script scripts/check-markdown.sh contains the following code to execute markdownlint:
# Get the repository root
repoRoot="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )/.." >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )"
# Execute markdownlint for the entire solution
markdownlint -c "${repoRoot}"/.markdownlint.json
When the Dev Container is loaded, any developer can now run this script in their terminal:
This is a small use case, there are unlimited other possibilities to capitalize on work done by developers to save time.
Other considerations
Platform architecture
When installing tooling, you also need to ensure that you know what host computers developers are using. All Intel based computers, whether they are running Windows, Linux or MacOs will have the same behavior. However, the latest Mac architecture (Apple M1/Silicon) being ARM64, means that the behavior is not the same when building Dev Containers.
For instance, if you want to install Azure-cli in your Dev Container, you won't be able to do it the same way you do it for Intel based machines. On Intel based computers you can install the deb package. However, this package is not available on ARM architecture. The only way to install Azure-cli on Linux ARM is via the Python installer pip.
To achieve this you need to check the architecture of the host building the Dev Container, either in the Dockerfile, or by calling an external bash script to install remaining tools not having a universal version.
Here is a snippet to call from the Dockerfile:
# If Intel based, then use the deb file
if [[ `dpkg --print-architecture` == "amd64" ]]; then
sudo curl -sL https://aka.ms/InstallAzureCLIDeb | sudo bash;
else
# arm based, install pip (and gcc) then azure-cli
sudo apt-get -y install gcc
python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install azure-cli
fi
Reuse of credentials for GitHub
If you develop inside a Dev Container, you will also want to share your GitHub credentials between your host and the Dev Container. Doing so, you would avoid copying your ssh keys back and forth (if you are using ssh to access your repositories).
One approach would be to mount your local ~/.ssh folder into your Dev Container. You can either use the mounts option of the devcontainer.json, or use Docker Compose
- Using
mounts:
As you can see, ${localEnv:HOME} returns the host home folder, and it maps it to the container home folder.
- Using Docker Compose:
version: '3'
services:
my-worspace:
env_file: ../configs/.env
build:
context: .
dockerfile: Dockerfile
volumes:
- "~/.ssh:/home/alex/.ssh"
command: sleep infinity
Please note that using Docker Compose requires to edit the devcontainer.json file as we have seen above.
You can now access GitHub using the same credentials as your host machine, without worrying of persistence.
Allow some customization
As a final note, it is also interesting to leave developers some flexibility in their environment for customization.
For instance, one might want to add aliases to their environment. However, changing the ~/.bashrc file in the Dev Container is not a good approach as the container might be destroyed. There are numerous ways to set persistence, here is one approach.
Consider the following solution structure:
My Application # main repo directory
└───.devcontainer
| ├───Dockerfile
| ├───docker-compose.yml
| ├───devcontainer.json
└───me
| ├───bashrc_extension
The folder me is untracked in the repository, leaving developers the flexibility to add personal resources. One of these resources can be a .bashrc extension containing customization. For instance:
We can now adapt our Dockerfile to load these changes when the Docker image is built (and of course, do nothing if there is no file):