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On this page there are 7 sections

Dev Containers tutorial

This tutorial walks you through running Visual Studio Code in a Docker container using the Dev Containers extension. You need no prior knowledge of Docker to complete this tutorial.

Running VS Code inside a Docker container can be useful for many reasons, but in this walkthrough we'll focus on using a Docker container to set up a development environment that is separate from your local environment.

Prerequisites

You need Visual Studio Code installed.

Install Docker

Docker is needed to create and manage your containers.

Docker Desktop

Download and install Docker Desktop, or an alternative Docker option, like Docker on a remote host or Docker compliant CLI.

Start Docker

Run the Docker Desktop application to start Docker. You will know it's running if you look in the activity tray and see the Docker whale icon.

Docker might take a few minutes to start. If the whale icon is animated, it is probably still in the process of starting. You can click on the icon to see the status.

Check Docker

Once Docker is running, you can confirm that everything is working by opening a new terminal window and typing the command:

node --version; npm --version

This should show the following versions:

Run the application

We can now hit F5, which will run the application inside the container. Once the process starts, navigate to http://localhost:3000 and you should see the simple Node.js server running!

Ending your container connection

You can end your session in the container and go back to running VS Code locally with File > Close Remote Connection.

How it works

This next section describes in more detail how the Dev Containers extension sets up and configures your containers.

The Dev Containers extension uses the files in the .devcontainer folder, namely devcontainer.json, and an optional Dockerfile or docker-compose.yml, to create your dev containers.

In the example we just explored, the project has a .devcontainer folder with a devcontainer.json inside. The devcontainer.json uses the image mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/javascript-node:0-18. You can explore this image in greater detail in the devcontainers/images repo.

First, your image is built from the supplied Dockerfile or image name, which would be mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/javascript-node:0-18 in this example. Then a container is created and started using some of the settings in the devcontainer.json. Finally your Visual Studio Code environment is installed and configured again according to settings in the devcontainer.json. For example, the dev container in this example installs the streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker extension.

Note: Additional configuration will already be added to the container based on what's in the base image. For example, we see the streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker extension above, and the container will also include "dbaeumer.vscode-eslint" as that's part of mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/typescript-node. This happens automatically when pre-building using devcontainer.json, which you may read more about in the pre-build section.

Once all of this is done, your local copy of Visual Studio Code connects to the Visual Studio Code Server running inside of your new dev container.

devcontainer.json

The devcontainer.json is basically a config file that determines how your dev container gets built and started.

# Displays the list of contexts, '*' denotes the current context docker context list # Switches the list to the 'default' context docker context use default

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