VSCodify Docker

Add a Visual Studio Code development environment to your docker base images.

Why would you want to do this?

My own motivation is for computer-vision related python projects, where I've often found that I can't get an environment working with just conda when the environment requires Caffe, OpenCV, ffmpeg, etc.

Rather than start installing required software to my own machine, I generally prefer to do everything in a docker container. The problem with that is, I then lack a modern development enviroment. To address this, I use vscodify-docker to create a 'devel' tag for my docker images, and then code in VS Code running over X11 from the docker container.

Getting started

The simplest integration is to add vscodify-docker to your project as a git submodule

# from the root of your working copy
git submodule add -b master https://github.com/beatthat/vscodify-docker.git

Copy the contents of vscodify-docker's copy_to_your_project/Makefile to a Makefile at the root of your own project, e.g.

# from the root of your working copy
cat vscodify-docker/copy_to_your_project/Makefile >> Makefile

Configure the VSCODE_BASE_IMAGE property of the Makefile to docker image[:tag] that you want to extend with a vscode-enabled tag, e.g.

# VSCODE_BASE_IMAGE
# 
# The base image to which Visual Studio Code support will be added.
#
# You generally do want to override this with your own base image.
VSCODE_BASE_IMAGE?=your-base-image-name[:and-tag]

Build the vscode-extended docker image. By default it will be tagged ${VSCODE_BASE_IMAGE}:vscode but you can change the tag by changing the VSCODIFY_DOCKER_IMAGE property in your Makefile.

# from the root of your working copy
make vscode-build

Finally, you can run dockerized Visual Studio Code on your project with

# from the root of your working copy
make vscode-run

The above should start docker and open an X11 Visual Studio Code window on your desktop with the your host-machine/local working copy in the vscode workspace.

Prerequisites

• linux (tested on ubuntu 18.04 but should work on any desktop linux dist)
• docker
• NOT yet supported on OSX or Windows (need to work out X11 or similar set up for each)

Use a custom .workingcopyrc to configure the environment for your project

The vscodify-docker set up is meant to be as generic/language agnostic as possible, but you're frequently going to want to make changes to your enviroment. The default entrypoint script for vscodify-docker supports this by looking for a .workingcopyrc file in the root of your working copy, and sourcing that script if it exists.

Example: say your project is in python and your repo includes a submodule MySubmodule and when you run the vscode docker env, you want that submodule included in the PYTHONPATH. You could make this happen by adding the following .workingcopyrc to your project root:

# .workingcopyrc at the root of your project
PYTHONPATH=${VSCODIFY_WORKING_COPY}/MySubmodule:${PYTHONPATH}

Use sh -l with docker exec to make sure your .workingcopyrc is sourced in the shell

If you've created a .workingcopyrc file for your project, you probably want it sourced for any shell you start with docker exec on a running instance of your dev container. To make this happen you need to use the -l argument with ssh when you run docker exec, e.g.

docker exec your_container_name:vscode -it \
    ssh -l -c 'your actual commands here in quotes'

The under-the-covers reason is that the workingcopyrc file was copied to /etc/profile.d at docker-run time, but by the rules of unix, scripts in that location only execute for 'login' shells. If down the road we find a way to get those environement variables sourced without ssh -l, we'll remove this extra requirement.

Authors

• Larry Kirschner - beatthat

See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Acknowledgments

• Based on allamand/docker-vscode