devcontainer-templates

A set of devcontainer templates following the nascent devcontainer template spec.

This repository contains both "barebones" templates aiming to be more lightweight and "batteries excluded" than the default templates, and some more complex "opinionated" templates that reflect my personal perspective on a good starting point for new projects in ecosystems/stacks I frequently use.

Motivation

Development containers ("devcontainers") are a core part of my development workflow. Microsoft curates an ecosystem of images, templates, and plug-in features that allow users to get started quickly and provide deep integration into VS Code.

Personally, I've experienced a fair bit of friction with the generated configuration from the default templates, and the preconfigured images that the templates use:

• The images are quite bloated by default and include tooling that may not be required by many or most applications, or in some cases even causes issues with common setups
• The images include tools and customisations that should be left up to the individual developer (e.g. garish shell prompt customisations)
• The images add a level of abstraction and dependencies that makes them harder to reason about than a manually maintained Dockerfile
• The images are overoptimised for integration with Microsoft tooling
• The generated configuration contains lots of superfluous scaffolding that is often left in by developers or left commented but gets outdated as the spec evolves
• The generated configuration for some stacks/ecosystems could be more useful in terms of including best practices to take full advantage of devcontainers

I was looking for a more barebones, explicit, and customisable approach on the one hand, and some more specific and opinionated templates on the other. A set of templates that I could use to set up a new project in minimal time, without having to refer back to previous projects for inspiration, and that I could evolve as time goes on.

Consider these templates to complement the default "official" ones - especially for inexperienced developers and those who don't want to have to customise their environment, the official templates are probably a better choice.

Goals

Ultimately, the primary goal of these templates is to meet my need for professional-grade templates to use when I set up a new project, without having to refer back to previous projects for inspiration, and that I could evolve as time goes on and the spec and my needs change.

The templates should:

• set a "gold standard" for how I would set up a new (or existing) project for a given stack to use devcontainers
• have simple configuration that is easy to understand, extend, customise, and maintain
• use default upstream Docker images for the target language/ecosystem
• keep the footprint of tooling and customisation small (or to the bare minimum in case of "barebones" templates)
• use a non-root user, but allow for sudo (many upstream images are geared towards production deployments and run as root)

Suggested usage

Use the templates to generate a basic devcontainer setup, then customise as follows:

• Add OS-level setup and system-level dependencies (e.g. OS package manager packages) to the Dockerfile
• Run add project-specific setup and development ecosystem dependency installation using a postCreateCommand in devcontainer.json. If it consists of more than one or two commands, consider adding a shell script in the .devcontainer folder and running that (the opinionated templates may already have one)
• Add the minimum necessary set of VS Code extensions and configuration to devcontainer.json (leaving space for other contributors/team members to not be overloaded with default setup)
• Any personal preferences of individual developers (e.g. environment customisation or tool installation) should be dealt with using VS Code's ability to auto-inject user dotfiles and run an installation script in the process (see the Debian section in my personal dotfiles install script for an example of how to achieve this).

Contributions

I've not yet figured out if I want to accept contributions to this repository. If you have an idea for a bug fix, improvement, or new template that would fit within the scope and philosophy of this project, please open an issue before you put in substantial work!