Project setup - Do you containerize your dev environment?

Developers love the feeling of getting a new project going for the first time. Unfortunately, the process of making things work is often a painful experience. Every developer has a different setup on their PC so it is common for a project to require slightly different steps.

The old proverb is "Works on my machine!"

Luckily, there is a way to make all development environments 100% consistent.

Video: Dev Containers from Microsoft (was Remote Containers) with Piers Sinclair (5 min)

Dev Containers let you define all the tools needed for a project in a programmatic manner. That gives 3 key benefits:

✅ Consistent isolated environments

✅ Pre-installed tools with correct settings

✅ Quicker setup (hours becomes minutes)

How do I set it up?

Microsoft has a great tutorial and documentation on how to get it running.

How does it work?

Dev Containers are setup with a few files in the repo:

devcontainer.json - This specifies the setup instructions for your Dev Container e.g. post creation commands, VS Code extensions
Docker-compose.yml
Dockerfile

These files define an image to use, tools to install and settings to configure.

Once those files are configured, you can simply run a command to get it running.

Where to run it - locally or in the cloud?

There are 2 places that Dev Containers can be run:

Your PC - Dev Containers in VS Code
In the cloud - GitHub Codespaces

Locally works awesome if you have a powerful PC. However, sometimes you might need to give an environment to people who don't have a powerful PC or you might want people to develop on an iPad. In that case it's time to take advantage of the cloud.