Working with Devcontainers

Written by: Dabiddo

Working with Devcontainers

As you have seend from previous post, I don’t like installing languages or plugins on my computer, ever since I discovered Docker, I like working with containers because I can downgrade or upgrade language versions easily.

Working with devcontainers has been really awesome, even though I only know a little, I have been able to share my enviroment configuration with my co-workers and don’t have to worry if they have the right version or the right extensions installed, since I can just declare it in the json file.

I have been doing a lot of experiments lately in my computer, and I found my self copy-pasting my .devcontainer folder from one project directory to another, therefore I am now creating my bash scripts that takes my standard .devcontainer and recreates it between projects.

I leave the link here: containerwizard

Now, this script is very biased on what I use, but if you find it usefull, or want to expand it, please do so.. any help is very much appreciated.

For this script I’m using Charm’s Gum extension, to add color and make it look cool, so you need to have the extension installed before running the script.

Building better devcontainers

Working with this script, has made me a bit curious on what enhancements I can make to my configuration. While searching on youtube, I found this cool presentation by Chris Ayers, where he explains how to work with devcontainers, and its not a deep dive, but it made me realize I have a lot to learn on making my configuration easier to read and automate.

With that in mind, I have the crazy idea to experiment with new devcontainer configurations and do a better script for my projects.