distrobox VS vscode-dev-containers

Regarding the stability issue on a dev machine - you may be interested in playing with one of the immutable-os distros, such as SilverBlue (fedora based).

The high-level take-away is you can't break your actual OS since it's root filesystem is read-only, and you use "pet" containers (on docker, podman, whatever) to do your work in. Applications are either sandboxed via Flatpak, or installed/run inside your pet containers. If your pet container dies, you cry about it for a moment, and when you're ready you get a new one - your actual os and other containers remain unaffected.

I use distrobox[1] to create/run the pet containers.

[1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Distrobox is a tool that enables us to try Linux distro CLI, including their package manager. This requires a containerization tool (e.g., Docker). In Windows, this can be achieved using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

I use containerized versions of things, ubuntu and chainguard images mostly.

You can always create containers with init if that's how you want to do that though. Some distros publish images that come that way: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505448 ... https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

Yes, you can do that but I've seen others use something like distrobox to run linux inside of SteamOS: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/steamdeck_guide.md

For such cases you might use something like this: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Btw #3: Depending on what the user is trying to accomplish, e.g. maybe to make WSL(2) itself more of a "subsystem" than a "container engine", using something like Distrobox or nsbox.dev can be a good idea (along with Docker or Podman in Distrobox's case; the other one uses systemd-nspawn).

1. Find here in "Containers Distros" section the distro image that you want to install ("Toolbox" versions are better because they are configured for Distrobox) and get it URL: https://distrobox.it/compatibility/#containers-distros 2. Use that URL to create Distrobox: distrobox create -i registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:39 -n fedora_1_39 3. Enter Distrobox fedora_1_39: distrobox enter fedora_1_39 4. You are already in Distrobox console. Look at the name in console, it should be include the container name. 5. To exit Distrobox: exit 6. If you run: distrobox list you will see all distroboxes on the system. You will also see that distrobox that we exited is still running. 7. To stop distrobox use commands: distrobox stop fedora_1_39

// For format details, see https://aka.ms/devcontainer.json. For config options, see the README at: // https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/tree/v0.241.1/containers/ubuntu { "name": "Ubuntu", "build": { "dockerfile": "Dockerfile", "args": { "VARIANT": "ubuntu-22.04" } }, "postStartCommand": ".devcontainer/env.sh", "remoteUser": "vscode", "features": { "git": "os-provided", "aws-cli": "latest", "golang": "latest", "sshd": "latest" } }

# See here for image contents: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/tree/v0.245.0/containers/python-3/.devcontainer/base.Dockerfile # [Choice] Python version (use -bullseye variants on local arm64/Apple Silicon): 3, 3.10, 3.9, 3.8, 3.7, 3.6, 3-bullseye, 3.10-bullseye, 3.9-bullseye, 3.8-bullseye, 3.7-bullseye, 3.6-bullseye, 3-buster, 3.10-buster, 3.9-buster, 3.8-buster, 3.7-buster, 3.6-buster ARG VARIANT="3.10-bullseye" FROM mcr.microsoft.com/vscode/devcontainers/python:0-${VARIANT} # [Choice] Node.js version: none, lts/*, 16, 14, 12, 10 ARG NODE_VERSION="none" RUN if [ "${NODE_VERSION}" != "none" ]; then su vscode -c "umask 0002 && . /usr/local/share/nvm/nvm.sh && nvm install ${NODE_VERSION} 2>&1"; fi # Install Google Chrome Stable and fonts # Note: this installs the necessary libs to make the browser work with Puppeteer. ENV PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD true RUN apt-get update && apt-get install gnupg wget -y && \ wget --quiet --output-document=- https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | gpg --dearmor > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/google-archive.gpg && \ sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list' && \ apt-get update && \ apt-get install google-chrome-stable -y --no-install-recommends && \ rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* # [Optional] If your pip requirements rarely change, uncomment this section to add them to the image. COPY requirements.txt /tmp/pip-tmp/ RUN pip3 --disable-pip-version-check --no-cache-dir install -r /tmp/pip-tmp/requirements.txt \ && rm -rf /tmp/pip-tmp

Looks like they do? https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/issues/675

In the vscode-dev-containers repo, you'll see that there too is a .devcontainer directory. This contains instructions for building the dotnet vscode-dev-container. Click into the directory.

I'm trying to set up a dev environment which utilises the standard Python 3 devcontainer for Python files (which is great IMO), but also utilises the R devcontainer for R files. Or at the very least sets up the basic R for VSCode environment espoused on the VSCode tutorials.

Select a predefined container definition. In my case I will select 'Ubuntu'. NOTE: There is a growing variety of predefined images that can be selected from, maintained on GitHubs vscode-dev-containers repository:

As documented here, a Dev Container's built-in features are sources from the script-library folder in the vscode-dev-containers repo. The Remote - Containers extension and GitHub Codespaces include "preview" functionality to extend Dev Container features. You can add any custom feature by using the dev-container-features-template sample repository.

In your case in the development container you can specify a specific version of .NET SDK and Azure Functions SDK. There is a premade devcontainer for VSCode with Azure Functions and C#: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/tree/main/containers/azure-functions-dotnet-6-isolated