DevContainer/Feature/Reference

• Dev Container Features reference

  • Quotes

    • Intro

      • Development Container Features are self-contained, shareable units of installation code and development container configuration. The name comes from the idea that referencing one of them allows you to quickly and easily add more tooling, runtime, or library “features” into your development container for you or your collaborators to use.
      • Feature metadata is captured by a devcontainer-feature.json file in the root folder of the feature.
      • Note: While Features may be installed on top of any base image, the implementation of a Feature might restrict it to a subset of possible base images. For example, some Features may be authored to work with a certain Linux distro (e.g. debian-based images that use the apt package manager).

    • Folder Structure

      • A Feature is a self contained entity in a folder with at least a devcontainer-feature.json and install.sh entrypoint script. Additional files are permitted and are packaged along side the required files.

      • +-- feature
        |    +-- devcontainer-feature.json
        |    +-- install.sh
        |    +-- (other files)

    • devcontainer-feature.json properties

      • The devcontainer-feature.json file defines metadata about a given Feature.
      • devContainerFeature.schema.json defines the schema for the devcontainer-feature.json file.

    • User environment variables

      • Feature scripts run as the root user and sometimes need to know which user account the dev container will be used with.
      • _REMOTE_USER and _CONTAINER_USER environment variables are passsed to the Features scripts with _CONTAINER_USER being the container’s user and _REMOTE_USER being the configured remoteUser. If no remoteUser is configured, _REMOTE_USER is set to the same value as _CONTAINER_USER.