Dev Containers

Why you should care about development containers

When someone new joins your project team, how long do they need until every tool is installed and they can run code on their development machine?

How much do the development setups of your different engineers differ? How long is your setup guide documentation?

“Works on my machine” is less of a problem these days if the application you’re developing is containerized. But what about the tools and configurations you need to develop your application which live outside of your application container?

GitHub Codespaces

What if you want to separate your development environment from your machine completely?

With development containers, you can use the power of containerization for your whole setup: Configure one file and have developers spin up a container with everything preinstalled so that they can focus on what matters: Developing your product.

GitHub has been a front runner in this domain with GitHub Codespaces: Combined with Visual Studio Code (in the browser or locally), you can open a fully featured IDE from any public GitHub repository by logging into GitHub and pressing “.”.

To standardize these development container configurations, Microsoft has created an open specification at Development containers.

Alternatives

Apart from Microsoft / GitHub, there are also other providers of similar services like Coder, which we recently investigated at one of our customers as an option to improve their development setup.

With Coder, you can set up development containers as terraform templates, which the developers can then invoke via a user-friendly web UI and then connect to from their favorite tool like Visual Studio Code.

Coder, in contrast to GitHub Codespaces, is run on your own on-prem or public cloud infrastructure, so you can use it independently of where you’re hosting your code.