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features
A collection of Dev Container Features managed by Dev Container spec maintainers. See https://github.com/devcontainers/feature-starter to publish your own
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nvim-dev-container
Neovim dev container support - Mirror of https://codeberg.org/esensar/nvim-dev-container
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InfluxDB
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spec
Development Containers: Use a container as a full-featured development environment. (by devcontainers)
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cli
A reference implementation for the specification that can create and configure a dev container from a devcontainer.json. (by devcontainers)
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
Dev Containers not only allow you to define which extensions should be installed and which configuration settings shall be set, but they also have something they call "Dev Container Features".
As you can see from the customizations section, Dev Containers are IDE agnostic. For example, there is a project implementing Dev Container support into nvim. But since the Visual Studio Code (vscode) team at Microsoft invented Dev Containers, it is currently the IDE with the best Dev Container experience.
How it works? Dev Containers is a specification based on Docker. This specification describes a metadata file (devcontainer.json), which defines how the project (Docker container, IDE settings, plugins, etc) is set up.
In my example above, I installed the developer tool "Just" as a Dev Container feature. I could also install it by adding the install script to my Dockerfile. However, I would have to build my own Dockerfile and would have to maintain this piece of code myself. This Dev Container Feature works on different architectures and base images, which makes them convenient to use.
As you can see from the customizations section, Dev Containers are IDE agnostic. For example, there is a project implementing Dev Container support into nvim. But since the Visual Studio Code (vscode) team at Microsoft invented Dev Containers, it is currently the IDE with the best Dev Container experience.
A list of available Dev Container Features, can be found here. However, you can also develop your own features and publish them, like I did.
So you can use Dev Containers from the vscode user interface rather intuitively. All configurations can also be edited directly and there is even a CLI. However, this CLI is made editor agnostic, so there is no vscode integration.
This is why I built vscli, a vscode CLI tool to launch projects and supports Dev Containers. It is written in Rust and includes a simple terminal UI, which allows you to quick-launch your recently opened projects: