General Availability of Dependabot Integration

23 Jan 2024

We are excited to announce that starting today, in collaboration with the Dependabot Team, the devcontainers package ecosystem is now generally available! Dependabot will now be able to update your public Dev Container Features, keeping them up-to-date with the latest published versions.

Speed Up Your Workflow with Prebuilds

22 Aug 2023

Getting dev containers up and running for your projects is exciting - you’ve unlocked environments that include all the dependencies your projects need to run, and you can spend so much more time on coding rather than configuration.

Best Practices: Authoring a Dev Container Feature

14 Jun 2023

Last November I wrote about the basics around authoring a Dev Container Feature. Since then, hundreds of Features have been written by the community. The flexibility of Features has enabled a wide variety of use cases, from installing a single tool to setting up specific aspects of a project’s development environment that can be shared across repositories. To that effect, many different patterns for Feature authorship have emerged, and the core team has learned a lot about what works well and what doesn’t.

Working with GitLab CI

15 Feb 2023

For simple use cases you can use your development container (dev container) for CI without much issue. Once you begin using more advanced dev container functionality such as Features, you will need dev container tooling in your CI pipeline. While GitHub CI has the devcontainers-ci GitHub Action, there is no such analog in GitLab CI. To achieve the goal of using your dev container in GitLab CI, the container must be pre-built.

Using Images, Dockerfiles, and Docker Compose

16 Dec 2022

When creating a development container, you have a variety of different ways to customize your environment like “Features” or lifecycle scripts. However, if you are familiar with containers, you may want to use a Dockerfile or Docker Compose / Compose to customize your environment. This article will walk through how to use these formats with the Dev Container spec.

Authoring a Dev Container Feature

01 Nov 2022

Development container “Features” are self-contained, shareable units of installation code and development container configuration. We define a pattern for authoring and self-publishing Features.