The Power of Dev Containers and GitHub Codespaces

Chris Ayers

Chris Ayers

Senior Customer Engineer
Microsoft

Twitter: @Chris_L_Ayers
Mastodon: @Chrisayers@hachyderm.io
LinkedIn: - chris-l-ayers
Blog: https://chris-ayers.com/
GitHub: Codebytes

Agenda

• Prerequisites
• What are Dev Containers?
• How Dev Containers Work?
• Why use Dev Containers?
• How to build a Dev Containers?

Prerequisites

What are Dev Containers?

Dev Containers are:

• Environments that run in a container
• Containers that let you open or mount any folder and still use VS Code UI and tooling
• Places to run Apps, Tools, or Runtimes needed for a project or codebase

Inner and Outer Loops

How Dev Containers Work

How do you build a Dev Container?

From the Command Pallet

Which Dev Container do I Pick?

Templates

Full List: https://containers.dev/templates

• Base (Alpine, Debian, Ubuntu)
• Language Based (C#, C++, Java, Go, Node, Python, Rust, Ruby, PHP)
• Tool Focused (Markdown, Kubernetes, Docker, Jekyll)

How Do I Configure it?

Customizations

• Features
• Extensions
• Settings
• Startup Tasks
• Networking

Features

Full list here: https://containers.dev/features

• CLIs (azure, gh, gcp, aws)
• Tools (Terraform, kubernetes...)
• Runtimes (Node, Python, Go, Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Rust, C/C++, C#)

GitHub Codespaces

• Don't need to worry about Docker Desktop
• VSCode, IntelliJ, Browser
• 2 core machines up to 32 core machines
• Default universal DevContainers
• Codespaces only offers Linux as the OS and x86_64 as the Architecture

GitHub Codespaces

DEMO TIME

Resources