zed-devcontainer

Experimental setup for making dev containers easier to use outside of VS Code. The name suggests Zed, but theoretically and eventually should work with any IDE or editor of your choosing.

Getting started

You'll need Docker installed and running, of course, along with the devcontainer package (available through Homebrew if you're using a Mac like me).

Current setup also requires jq on the host to capture the Docker container ID and save it for future use. If you want to use the Just recipes you'll also need just, or you can read through them in justfile and copy/paste into your terminal.

View the currently available Just recipes:

just list

I've included a small Sinatra web application for the purpose of testing port forwarding. Unlike VS Code, you'll need to explicitly set appPort in your .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file. That's done for you here.

Start up the devcontainer:

just dc-up

Then shell into the running container, install the dependencies, and run the server:

just dc-shell

bundle
ruby server.rb

Back in your host, hit http://localhost:4567 in your favorite HTTP client. It should work! Or at least, it does on my machine!

To delete the devcontainer, back in your host, run

just dc-down

For later

• First off, this represents less than an hour of work, so there may be better ways to do these things. It's hard to know for sure since the devcontainer-cli docs are sparse.
• I know Zed has a "tasks" feature that may be handier than my just recipes; I just haven't dug into that feature yet.
• The current recipes are a small set of what I'd potentially want--quickly rebuilding containers with/without cache comes to mind.
• Need a better place to store the running devcontainer's ID, or figure out how to get the necessary information to spin down a devcontainer some other way (since devcontainer down is not a thing).

Other notes

• I cheated and used VS Code to create the initial devcontainer config files, but otherwise used Zed for this project.