micromamba-devcontainer

A general-purpose Micromamba-enabled VS Code development container image.

Save the time and effort of configuring development tools for each project × collaborator × device.

Featuring:

• Reproducible and isolated development environments "as code". 📄
• Runs remotely (e.g. from the cloud) just as well as locally. ☁️
• Several common tools (including Docker) are pre-installed with convenient defaults to minimize necessary configuration. 🐳

Alternative

This project is meant to provide a comprehensive Micromamba base image for development.

If instead you'd prefer a minimalistic approach for adding Micromamba to an existing dev container, see the Micromamba dev container feature.

Links

• This micromamba-devcontainer on GitHub
• Docker images on GitHub Container Registry
• Example development container for a Python project
• Micromamba Docker container (parent image)
• VS Code Developing inside a Container documentation
• VS Code devcontainer.json reference documentation

Getting started / Usage

Quickstart

Refer to this example and this corresponding cookiecutter template for how this image can be used.

In short, if the Remote - Containers extension installed in VS Code, you can clone the example repository and open it with VS Code.

You will then be prompted to reopen it in a container:

.

Upon reopening, VS Code will build the development Dockerfile if necessary, launch a container, install the VS Code backend inside, and configure everything according to the specification defined in .devcontainer/devcontainer.json.

The project folder will then open, mounted inside the container, and all installed extensions (e.g. Docker, Git History, and Jupyter) will be available:

Details

The Dockerfile hosted in this repository is intended to be used as the base image for the dev.Dockerfile which is specified in devcontainer.json.

To adapt this to your own project, your dev.Dockerfile should install development dependencies and initialize your project for development (for example by running pip install --editable . for Python a project).

Introduction

This repository hosts the base image for a VS Code development container which comes with the following features to ease development:

• Micromamba via mambaorg/micromamba.
• Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy).
• Sudo rights for the default user.
• Docker, Docker Compose and BuildKit installed for use from within the container.
• Basic command-line utilities from Ubuntu (e.g. nano, git, less, man, htop, zip, jq, ping).
• Configuration of Git, with some helpful defaults
• Can be used remotely over SSH.

Configuration

Running "Docker from Docker"

If you want Docker to be accessible from within the development container, simply bind-mount /var/run/docker.sock.

In this case, any other containers started from within the development container will run alongside the development container.

It is recommended to install Microsoft's VS Code Docker extension within the development container.

Git pre-configured for ease-of-use

Note that VS Code will automatically try to copy the user's Git configuration to the development container. This includes user.name and user.email, as well as GPG keys. To configure authenticated access to Git repositories via the SSH protocol, see SSH agent.

The following have been set as system defaults within the container (git config --system):

• The default editor is nano.
• Pulling is configured with fast-forward only, to avoid unexpected merge-conflict situations.
• The blame-ignore file is automatically configured to .git-blame-ignore-revs when it exists.
• The default branch name is main.

In addition,

• Git is ready for use with pre-commit: newly created or cloned repositories will use pre-commit when both pre-commit is installed and a .pre-commit-config.yaml exists.)
• Git LFS comes pre-installed.

SSH agent

VS Code can automatically forward your local SSH keys (e.g. for use with Git) to the development container (even when that development container is remote). Detailed instructions are here.

The main steps are:

1. Make sure the SSH agent is running locally by opening a local terminal and listing your keys with ssh-add -l. (In case the agent is not running, follow the instructions in the above link.)
2. In case no keys are listed ("The agent has no identities"), add them by running ssh-add. (To instead add an individual key, run ssh-add <path-to-key>). Run ssh-add -l again to verify that the key was added.
3. Check if your keys are being forwarded to the container by opening an integrated terminal in the development container (Ctrl+Shift+`) and running ssh-add -l. The results should agree with the local terminal.

Troubleshooting

Known issues

Extensions don't initialize at first

When extensions are installed for the first time after the container is started or rebuilt, there may be a series of warning notifications due to the extensions not initializing properly. They usually go away after reloading the window, either by clicking on one of the buttons, or by running the command Ctrl+Shift+P → Developer: Reload Window.

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Permission denied when multiple users run development containers on the same computer

This is a known issue with VS Code. The precise error is:

EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/tmp/vsch

One solution is to log into the host machine and run

sudo chmod -R a+rwX /tmp/vsch

(This could reduce security and is recommended only when all the users are trusted.)

Permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket

Check that your user within the devcontainer is a member of the docker group:

(base) mambauser@devcontainer:/workspaces/micromamba-devcontainer-example$ groups
mambauser sudo docker

It seems to happen occasionally that the user does not get added as a member of the Docker group, and I don't understand why. (Perhaps a race condition?) Try quitting all VS Code windows and rebuilding the container. Please create an issue if you have any insight.

Unknown issues

If you encounter some other problem, please file an issue with this GitHub repository.