Build Dockerfile for Visual Studio remote debugging

This is a small Node.js app for automating creation of Dockerfiles that can be used to build containers which can be used for remote debugging native apps from Visual Studio using the Visual C++ for Linux Development extension. To run the app do the following:

• Install Docker
• Install a recent version of Node.js
• Install Yarn package manager

Now open a terminal and run the following from the folder where you cloned the repo:

$ yarn
$ node app.js

This will produce output that looks like this:

$ node app.js
[*] Reading Dockerfile template.
[*] Creating output folder C:\code\docker-linux-dev-image\output\HyoI9qTUe.
[*] Generating new keypair.
[*] Saving private key file.
[*] Saving public key file.
[*] Generating Dockerfile.

> The SSH keys and Dockerfile are in the folder C:\code\docker-linux-dev-image\output\HyoI9qTUe.

The generated Dockerfile along with SSH keys is dropped into the output folder. CD into the output folder and build the Docker image the usual way:

$ cd output/HyoI9qTUe
$ docker build -t vsdebug .

If everything goes well you'll find the newly minted image in your Docker engine. Now to run a container from this image you'd run the following command:

docker run -d -p 2222:22 --security-opt seccomp:unconfined vsdebug

This will spin a container up with an SSH server listening on local port 2222. You can test this out by SSHing to this server like so:

$ cd output/HyoI9qTUe
$ ssh -i id_rsa -p 2222 root@localhost

Now you should be able to remote debug your Linux apps form Visual Studio as documented in this blog post.