Development Containers Images

Development Container Images Published docker images for use as development containers

A development container is a running Docker container with a well-defined tool/runtime stack and its prerequisites. It allows you to use a container as a full-featured development environment which can be used to run an application, to separate tools, libraries, or runtimes needed for working with a codebase, and to aid in continuous integration and testing.

This repository contains a set of dev container images which are Docker images built with dev container features.

Contents

• src - Contains reusable dev container images.

Common Questions

How does this repo relate to the dev container spec? What is the dev container specification?

The Development Containers Specification seeks to find ways to enrich existing formats with common development specific settings, tools, and configuration while still providing a simplified, un-orchestrated single container option – so that they can be used as coding environments or for continuous integration and testing. You may review the spec and learn more about it in the devcontainers/spec repo and containers.dev.

This repository supplies images that may be used in dev container configurations that follow the spec.

What is the goal of devcontainer.json?

A devcontainer.json file is similar to launch.json for debugging, but designed to launch (or attach to) a development container instead. At its simplest, all you need is a .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file in your project that references an image, Dockerfile, or docker-compose.yml, and a few properties.

Why do Dockerfiles in this repo use RUN statements with commands separated by &&?

Each RUN statement creates a Docker image "layer". If one RUN statement adds temporary contents, these contents remain in this layer in the image even if they are deleted in a subsequent RUN. This means the image takes more storage locally and results in slower image download times if you publish the image to a registry. You can resolve this problem by using a RUN statement that includes any clean up steps (separated by &&) after a given operation. You can find more tips here.

How can I contribute?

If you want to create your own image or add functionality on top of the images available in this repository, then see How to write Dockerfiles and the dev container features reference.

This repository contains a select set of images, and we encourage the community to host and share additional images, and features rather than adding them here. You may learn more about this process in the guidance in our spec repo. You may also check out the features repo for additional customizations you may adopt or modify for your dev containers.

Feedback

Issues related to these images can be reported in an issue in this repository.

License

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.

For images generated from this repository, see LICENSE and NOTICE.txt.