Tidy up your machine with Visual Studio Code Dev Containers

I recently discovered the Visual Studio Code - Dev Containers feature and I thought to share with you it because in my opinion, it's so cool.

I'm collaborating on an open source project in Rust and as soon as I approached the repo I thought:
"No, I don't want to install all the dependencies and mess up my environment with a thousand things..."

Developer Experience

Fortunately, the project maintainers were smart enough to configure the project to be able to contribute without much fuss.

Visual Studio Code Dev Containers

The Visual Studio Code Dev Containers extension lets you use a Docker container as a full-featured development environment. It allows you to open any folder or repository inside a container and take advantage of Visual Studio Code's full feature set.

Configuration

devcontainer.json

describes how VS Code should start the container and what to do after it connects.

// For format details, see https://aka.ms/devcontainer.json
{
  "name": "My devcontainer",
  "hostRequirements": {
    "cpus": 4
  },
  // Add the IDs of extensions you want installed when the container is created.
  "extensions": [
    [...],
    [...],
  ],
  "build": {
    "dockerfile": "Dockerfile"
  },
  "waitFor": "onCreateCommand",
  "updateContentCommand": "corepack prepare & pnpm install",
  "forwardPorts": [3300, 9229],
  "customizations": {
    "codespaces": {
      "openFiles": ["CONTRIBUTING.md"]
    }
  },
  "portsAttributes": {
    "3300": {
      "label": "Serve",
      "onAutoForward": "openPreview"
    }
  }
}

Dockerfile

We can use a Dockerfile that defines the contents of the container.

FROM cimg/rust:1.65.0-node

RUN rustup --version; \
    cargo --version; \
    rustc --version; \
    rustup update; \
    rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown; \
    cargo install cargo-insta; \
    rustup component add clippy; \
    corepack enable --install-directory ~/bin

Docker

Obviously, you need to have Docker up and running on your machine.

VsCode Extension

To spin up the container and work inside it, you need to install the Dev Containers extension and then you can run
Dev Containers: Open Folder in Container command.